Lots and lots of storage... options?

h4rm0ny

h4rm0ny

h4rm0ny

Soldato
Joined
25 Jun 2011
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Yorkshire and proud of it!
Hi,

I recently decided to upgrade to a 5930K and as I'm coming from an FX-8350 that's full motherboard, new RAM, everything. And I'm looking for a motherboard.

Not much of a gamer (though I do have a R9-285 I'll be using). Primarily what I want is tonnes of storage as I need it for my work. I want a mix of traditional HD and SSD. (I currently have 4 WD Caviar Black drives and three SSDs, but will be adding more).

Problem is that although I'll only have one or two PCI-E SSDs right now, I want to plan for the future when prices on these have come down. All the motherboards I can find are perfectly happy to give me four x16 PCI-E slots to eat up all those lanes but at best I have found one motherboard which has two M.2 slots. Are there motherboards out there that have more because I can't find them. Or are there adaptor cards that will let me plug them into regular PCI-E slots because I can't find those, either. There's SATA Express but I can't find any drives that use this despite every motherboard I look at having such sockets.

I feel I must be missing something here. Any good boards out there?

Lots of thanks if anyone can help.
 
Yeah well gigabyte z170 gaming 3 (or ud3) has 2 m.2 slots which personally I find to be enough for my own needs.

Yeah you can also get more expensive ones with 3 m.2 slots. The z170 SOC Force, but it hasn't been released yet.

There's also the ASRock Extreme 7+, and it's sister board (the yellow one) which is the Z170 OC formula.

But bear in mind that Z170 PCH only has 4 lanes on it total (switched). So Intel RST / Raid 0 setups through the PCH are capped at a total b/w of 3.5 GB/sec sequential.

An adapter m.2 sata --> 2.5" sata can be had for £4.

And adapter m.2 pcie OR SATA --> pci-e 3.0 x4, can be had for £7.
 
Thanks. Sounds like I'm getting ahead of where the technology is currently at.

So I could get something like the below to get extra PCI-E drives on?

"Lycom DT-120, PCIe 3.0 x4 Host Adapter for M.2 NGFF PCIe SSD "

(Removed diect link), I couldn't find any equivalents here on overclockers (but if there are please tell me where as I like OC's service quality).
 
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Yeah, sorry you shouldn't post to competitors. But there are similar devices already available in the UK market for only £7. You just have to look a little harder for them.

Ultimately it's just a simple PCB with some copper wires on it. There's no difference in the electrical spec etc. or need for any other conversion chips / bridges. Since it's already pci-e x4 the m.2 card.
 
dreamcat4 said:
Yeah, sorry you shouldn't post to competitors. But there are similar devices already available in the UK market for only £7. You just have to look a little harder for them.

Ultimately it's just a simple PCB with some copper wires on it. There's no difference in the electrical spec etc. or need for any other conversion chips / bridges. Since it's already pci-e x4 the m.2 card.
Click to expand...

Okay, I didn't see much choice as I couldn't find such a product on OC and I needed to make sure I was talking about the right thing. I've edited it out and just left the name of the product.

So to make absolutely certain I've got this right, I could do something like the following:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-629-AS&groupid=701&catid=5 with a 5930K.

Connect 4 traditional HDs via SATA ports, one M.2 PCI-E drive to the M.2 port (example, this: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-207-SA&groupid=1657&catid=2101&subcat=219 ) and then get say, four of the adaptor boards I mentioned earlier and plug in four more of those M.2. PCI-E drives? Oh, and my two existing SSDs on SATA ports as well.

Adding in my R9-285 graphics card, I make that 5x4 + 16 PCI lanes used out of the 40 available, so I would have GPU, plus 4 HDs, 2 SSDs and 5 PCI-E SSDs in total.

Is that all correct? Really appreciate this before I spend any money! :)

EDIT: Added the processor I'm intending to buy as it makes a difference whether it's the 5920 or the 5930.
 
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Yeah. That looks about right to me.

Just be sure to check the usual mobo particulars in respect to pci-e card slots / disablement / conflict of other features.
 
dreamcat4 said:
Yeah. That looks about right to me.

Just be sure to check the usual mobo particulars in respect to pci-e card slots / disablement / conflict of other features.
Click to expand...

Thanks. It's good to get someone else's opinion when you're about to spend a lot of money (well, I'll be buying it up bit by bit, but it starts here. ;) ).

Quartz said:
Why not leave the storage in your old PC and set it up as a server?
Click to expand...

Tempting. But I'm actually doing work with VMs and databases. Chunky databases. I basically want lots of really fast storage. I may even RAID-0 the PCI-E SSDs if that's doable?
 
dreamcat4 said:
Well whatever you buy this year will be destroyed by Intel XPoint next year. So try not to buy too many of them (SM951s).
Click to expand...

Does anyone have a feel yet for what sort of capacities we'll see with that and at what sort of price ranges?
 
Yeah, there will probably be a 128GB version, I am guessing at about SM951 250GB prices.

That's just speculation though by Intel's own statements we would expect the cost to be something less than DDR4. I would use 1/2 price of DDR4 ram prices as an upper bound for it to be 'affordable'.

So if I bought my 16GB DDR4 for £80 last month. Then that would equate to about £320 for 128GB.
 
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