Multiple SSD M.2 NVMe Drives - Drive Bay recommended

GodMac · 16 Dec 2020 at 15:39

I have 6 x 256Gb NVMe drives and I'm looking for a drive bay I can fit then in and RAID them. At the most I've seen a PCIe adapater that takes 2 but I wondered if anyone new of a larger option such as an external drive NAS that would take a few I could RAID and run from a PCIe controller?

Thnx

HoneyBadger · 16 Dec 2020 at 18:18

Asus and Asrock have RAID cards (PCIE) and these are PCIE3.0 (Not 4) but for more, you’re looking at something a little less domestic, such as this.

Alternatively, Gigabyte do a 4 channel PCIE4.0 card.

GodMac · 16 Dec 2020 at 19:22

Thanks, these look excellent. Might have to change my mobo though for the additional PCIe slot. But defo worth a review.

Cheers

Avalon · 18 Dec 2020 at 07:39

Before you go down the route of getting a 4xNVMe card, you really want to do some reading, they had issues. Also unless the workload is sequential large files, you aren’t going to see any real benefit in terms of speed from NVMe RAID and resilience is likely better as R1, so 6x256 + shonky bifurcation on a 4xNVMe board seems an unusual choice compared to say 2x1TB.

pc-guy · 18 Dec 2020 at 08:29

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Accessories/HYPER-M-2-X16-GEN-4-CARD/

Dunno if this is what you looking for but it offers up 4 m.2 per pciex16. No hardware raid and will required supported CPU for raid function.

Penfold101 · 18 Dec 2020 at 08:45

Also, unless you’ve got a threadripper or aren’t using a graphics card, you won’t be able to access all 4 slots. 2 at most will be usable with 8 lanes, and another 8 lanes to the GPU. that’s the way I understand it anyway...