Why no NVMe racks on motherboards/in cases?

katie279

katie279

katie279

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Hi all,

Quick dummy question.

Love the PCIe 'stick' hard disks these days 20x smaller, miles faster and no more cable clutter.

Why don't we just have racks of these? I'm imagining motherboards with four slots like the do for RAM dimms and four slots for NVMe drives. Likewise why do we not see four way adapters to let me go to town?

I get it'll take time to migrate, but would have expected to see top end motherboards innovating fairly quickly, but they all seem to stick with just one?
 
katie279 said:
Hi all,

Quick dummy question.

Love the PCIe 'stick' hard disks these days 20x smaller, miles faster and no more cable clutter.

Why don't we just have racks of these? I'm imagining motherboards with four slots like the do for RAM dimms and four slots for NVMe drives. Likewise why do we not see four way adapters to let me go to town?

I get it'll take time to migrate, but would have expected to see top end motherboards innovating fairly quickly, but they all seem to stick with just one?
Click to expand...

Top end motherboard tend to have a few of these m.2 ports the board in my machine for example allows for 3x m.2 nvme gen4. Some boards also take this further and offer a u.2 connector for bigger storage arrays on top of the nvme. There are also options for populating a pci express slots with a further 4x m.2 drives with devices such as the Asus Hyper m.2 in my board you would max out at something like 15x m.2 drives if you wanted to. Personally I run 2 in Raid 0 and then one runs solo as a scratch disk.

The biggest issue is the bandwidth and PCI lanes required for this. The best CPU's like my chip a threadripper 3960x offer 88 PCI express lanes. But more mainstream chips like say a ryzen 5600x only have 24 lanes and your GPU probably needs 16 of them. Same goes with the 12700k that has 20 pci express lanes. So at that point you either need to rely on your boards ability to bifurcate lanes or on a PCH controller to add additional lanes all of which have their downsides.
 
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katie279 said:
Ah nest, hadn't seen that hyper m2 - that's exactly what I need. Also hadn't spotted motherboards with lots - only looked at a few. Great to know, thanks! Thinking of a new graphics pc build and these will change the game in RAID.......
Click to expand...

They do but it totally depends on how much you are willing to spend. Remember all of this nvme runs over the pci express bus so you can easily saturate pci express lanes if you don't have enough :)
 
katie279 said:
Hmm, what would the impact of that? Eg would it saturate the GPU and impact that or would it just limit the slot it's in (ie hard disks go slower than full potential?)
Click to expand...

Normally the latter but to be honest I wouldn't imagine you would have a major issue. It's just something to be aware of.
 
katie279 said:
Hmm, what would the impact of that? Eg would it saturate the GPU and impact that or would it just limit the slot it's in (ie hard disks go slower than full potential?)
Click to expand...

It depends on hows the manufacturer configs their motherboards. For example if the GPU slot was shared with other slots or lanes it would may limit all of it or prioritize it.
 
Some of the latest boards can take 5 x m2
Even my x570 can do 3 of them and I am using all 3 x m2 slots
Which as @Vince said cuts the gpu from x16 to x8
I don't even notice it's not at x16 to be honest
And I tried mine in raid 0 for the fun of it
No great benefit for everyday use
Though some specific usages may benefit from it
 
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