NVMe Raid Controller?

[officercockster]

I ran out of NVMe slots on my motherboard and I'm looking to get a PCIe card to add some additional nvme drives. I'd like to run them in RAID 0 and I've heard that it's best to use a dedicated RAID controller if possible. Any suggestions? 

 

Current specs (in case it matters):

EVGA X299 Dark

i9-9900K

Samsung NVMe 970 EVO Plus Series (1TB)

Samsung NVMe 960 Pro Series (1TB)

EVGA 2080Ti 

 

I was looking at Asus Hyper M.2 X16 and Sonnet M.2 4x4

[Electronics Wizardy]

There really isn't any raid card for nvme drives. Your best option is to use softwrae raid like storage spaces or md here. also nvme raid often doesnt' really help in many real world situations

 

Both of those card you listed just allow more drives to be connected over pcie, no raid functions.

[mariushm]

Those cards only work if the motherboard supports pci-e bifurcation, a method of splitting the pci-e x16 slot into multiple pci-e x4 slots.

Your cpu only has 16 pci-e lanes, so it's kinda pointless to have all those pci-e x16 slots when you can't use them with that cpu.

See page 29 https://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/151-SX-E299.pdf

 

Your m.2 connectors seem to be sucking 8 pci-e lanes already, leaving just 8 pci-e lanes for the video card.

Technically you have 2 slots with 4 pci-e lanes coming from PCH, which in turn is connected to CPU through a dedicated link that's equivalent with 4 GB/s

So you could use cheap 5-10$ adapter boards to plug a m.2 drive on adapter then plug adapter in pci-e slot and you have up to 4 GB/s speed. Problem is if you use two ssds each in one of those pci-e slots (PE5 and PE6) your connection to cpu will still be limited to that dedicated link's speed.

[ToastyBear]

You don't need a RAID controller unless you actually plan to RAID them. If you just want more expansion slots just buy the Asus.