Installing my 10th hard drive - bandwidth compromise

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 20:29

Hi,

I wanted to get 2nd opinion from the OC community.

I have a Z690 system with a 12900k CPU, 3090 GPU, Maximus Z690 (Hero) 64GB of DDR5 RAM and 9 drives.

I have six Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB (4 of them in Raid 0), one NVMe Samsung SSD 980 PRO 250GB, one NVMe Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB and Corsair NVMe Corsair MP400 8TB. I'm thinking of installing a Seagate FireCuda 530 Series 4TB M.2.

PC Specialist have said if I do this, it'll compromise the performance of my system, their exact words:

then your machine will run out of PCI-e Express lanes and bandwidth. This will then be further subdivided between ALL of the current drives in the machine resulting in them running at a much slower speed.

I have a ROG Hyper M.2 PCI-e Card, that houses all my M.2 drives.

PCS have a tendency to walk a loada' waffle, so looking to get some thoughts and views here before choosing to make the purchase or not.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 20:39

It's all backed up and warrantied.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 20:53

GaryTheSnail said:
Adding another drive won't do anything as long as you have enough connections wouldn't worry about it. I would be more worried about that amount of data going bye bye.

Hi,

It's all backed up. So PCS are just talking gibberish?

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 20:58

GaryTheSnail said:
Why is your PC talking to you?

What's a PCS ?

PC Specialist.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 20:58

Dg834man said:
It already is, using the ROG Hyper M.2 PCI-e Card stole half the lanes from your graphics card, another nvme in there aint going to make any difference.

So, you're saying my 3090 can't deliver maximum performance?

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:05

Okay. Looks like the drop in performance is marginal.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:14

GaryTheSnail said:
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1700/ROG_MAXIMUS_Z690_HERO/E20159_ROG_MAXIMUS_Z690_HERO_UM_V3_WEB.pdf

* Please check PCIe bifurcation table in Chapter 1. ** When ROG Hyper M.2 card is installed on PCIEX16(G5)_1, PCIEX16(G5)_2 will run x8 only and if ROG Hyper M

So no the GPU isn't running maximum performance.

Check the manual and have a read.

Okay, thank you for pointing that out. If it's marginal, then fair enough?

I didn't ask PCS to install it. They did this themselves, so I guess it isn't much of a drop.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:26

GaryTheSnail said:
You won't see a problem, that system is a beast that you have anyway. Nothing to worry about at all IMO.

Thank you.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:26

Okay, is it worth upgrading to the 13900 CPU and the 4090 GPU?

I've been told the setup I have at the moment is only capable of playing at least half of the games at 4K (Ultra settings) at 60FPS on my ROG Swift PG32UQX.

Others' have said it'd be moronically senseless for me to upgrade the CPU/GPU.

Your thoughts, please?

Can, I point out, just in case, that I'm below a novice when it comes to system knowledge. I'm still learning.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:44

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:45

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:45

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:45

https://i.ibb.co/z8bqhfx/DSC-0008.jpg

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:46

Sorry, not sure why the images are big, but if you click it, it reduces the size.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:50

Cheers.

Vector Sigma · 21 Oct 2022 at 21:59

Penfold101 said:
Ahh, I missed the fact the first four were SSD’s and not M.2, my bad.

Either way, you can’t use more than 2 slots on the Hyper card - the system physically can’t see them.

Awesome cable management and username though!

Thank you.