Two spare NVMe drives - is the ASUS Hyper M.2 V2 good?

Sumanji

Sumanji

Sumanji

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Hi All,

I will soon have two spare 500GB 970 EVO drives (pulled from two separate machines, and being replaced with 2TB drives). I'm toying with the idea of putting the old drives in a RAID-1 array to run big games off (Destiny 2, GTA5 etc.).

The Asus card seems cheap and readily available - is this a good option or would it be overkill?

Cheers,

Su
 
Sumanji said:
Hi All,

I will soon have two spare 500GB 970 EVO drives (pulled from two separate machines, and being replaced with 2TB drives). I'm toying with the idea of putting the old drives in a RAID-1 array to run big games off (Destiny 2, GTA5 etc.).

The Asus card seems cheap and readily available - is this a good option or would it be overkill?

Cheers,

Su
Click to expand...

don't you need a HEDT motherboard to support these cards?
 
Ah, I am not sure actually! Was hoping you guys could tell me this stuff :D

If that's the case, could I at least just get a single drive convertor card?
 
I saw people mentioning pcie bifurcation in context with these cards and using more than 1 drive but never looked into it.
 
Each drive needs 4 PCI lanes, so as long as you can run your 16x slots as two 8x slots you’ll be fine. If you want to add any more drives to it, then you HAVE to give it the extra lanes and forgo your GPU, unless you’re running a threadripper....

edit: this is also the reason you never find an expansion card that converts NVME to Sata or holds more than one drive - the architecture requires them to use PCI lanes.
 
Got it, thanks chaps for the replies. Did a bit more reading and it does indeed seem like I would need to put the expansion card in the 2nd PCI-E x16 slot and then split the lanes with the top slot so they run x8 and x4/x4... unfortunately not an option, as I have a triple slot GPU with a brace that takes up the 4th expansion slot!

Plan B - I think I can run just one of the drives in something like the Asus Hyper M.2 Mini and stick it in the bottom PCI-E slot (which comes straight off the chipset). Might be a latency penalty, but should be good without stealing GPU lanes... please correct me if this isn't right!

Cheers,

Su
 
Sumanji said:
Got it, thanks chaps for the replies. Did a bit more reading and it does indeed seem like I would need to put the expansion card in the 2nd PCI-E x16 slot and then split the lanes with the top slot so they run x8 and x4/x4... unfortunately not an option, as I have a triple slot GPU with a brace that takes up the 4th expansion slot!

Plan B - I think I can run just one of the drives in something like the Asus Hyper M.2 Mini and stick it in the bottom PCI-E slot (which comes straight off the chipset). Might be a latency penalty, but should be good without stealing GPU lanes... please correct me if this isn't right!

Cheers,

Su
Click to expand...

yeah, you won’t get the full performance of the NVME drive but it’ll still be decent storage. This is the reason I’m looking at the expansion cards by Sedna - they’re SSD storage which is more than fast enough for data - only the OS and games really need the NVME speeds.

mind you, there’s always the Liqid Honey Badger...
 
Ahh dang, because the chipset slots are only PCI-E 2.0 right? What sequential read speed would that limit to?

[edit] Each lane seems like 500Mbps, so I guess 2Gbps for an x4 slot?
 
Sumanji said:
Ahh dang, because the chipset slots are only PCI-E 2.0 right? What sequential read speed would that limit to?

[edit] Each lane seems like 500Mbps, so I guess 2Gbps for an x4 slot?
Click to expand...

The question you need to ask is whether you need anything faster? I can’t imagine you’d see much change in performance, if any, compared to using it in the full NVME slot where games are concerned. Maybe a second or two more on a loading screen...?
 
Haha, yeah it's a fair question... it's a classic case of need vs. want :p

Well, can't complain about an extra 500GB of pretty fast storage so will roll with it!
 
What setup are you using? albeit I dunno what the situation would be with RAID but I've stuck a cheap (Akasa) PCIe adaptor and Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVME drives in my ageing setup and get full speeds and latency without any issues.

TBH the advantages are pretty small outside of some specific stuff though - for instance I tried Cyberpunk 2077 on both NVME (3.5GB/s read) and a Kingston HyperX 3K SSD (0.5GB/s read) and load times were only about 2-3 seconds quicker at most on the NVME.
 
Defo too rich for me! And it would still be bottle-necked by the PCI-E 2.0 from the chipset. I just wanted to cheap-ish way to make good use of the best drives, so the simple single drive adapter seems like the way to go :)

@Rroff that's pretty interesting on the load times for CP2077, which I imagine is pretty demanding. Seems I probably won't be missing out on much!
 
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