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

Sumanji · 18 Jan 2021 at 00:01

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 · 18 Jan 2021 at 17:36

Ah, I am not sure actually! Was hoping you guys could tell me this stuff

If that's the case, could I at least just get a single drive convertor card?

Sumanji · 19 Jan 2021 at 05:52

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 · 19 Jan 2021 at 07:22

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 · 19 Jan 2021 at 17:16

Haha, yeah it's a fair question... it's a classic case of need vs. want

Well, can't complain about an extra 500GB of pretty fast storage so will roll with it!

Sumanji · 19 Jan 2021 at 21:08

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!