ASUS HYPER M.2 EXPANSION CARD

[Alfred_88]

I will be doing an upgrade soon

I will be getting an 3600XT or 3600X(depending on which one I manage to get my hands on) , a Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE V1 or V2(depending on which one I manage to get my hands on)

A Gigabyte GTX 1650 with 4 gigs of GDDR6 

A 500GB Samsung 970 evo plus PCIe NVMe SSD

I am planning to get a 4TB(1TB x 4) Team MP33 PCIe NVMe SSD(I am going to use the ASUS hyper m.2 expansion card)

The asus hyper m.2 will support up to 4 pcie 3.0 x 4 ssd when connect to a x16 slot

I am afraid that I won't have enough pcie lane and the asus hyper m.2 will only be able to work with only 1 ssd

(Since 3600XT have 24 lanes(16-4-4) I have used 16 lanes for the gpu and another 4 for my 970 evo plus so I'm afraid it only have 4 lanes left and only 1 ssd will work(note that this mobo have 2 m.2 slot, I'm leaving the second one empty, so maybe this will disable the second slot or maybe it won't work at all), another concern is the motherboard will split the x16 slot becoming x8 and x8 and leaving the second m.2 slot available, I'm not realy concern about getting only x8 for the gpu but what I am concern about is the card only able to support 2 ssd. If this is true i can only get 3 or even 2 m.2 nvme, and i'm looking for 5 m.2)
Do you guys think the card will support 4 ssd or will it only support 2 or even 1 ssd?? and if it will not support all 4  ssd what is the best alternative? (I need 5 m.2 slots)

[Archer42]

This card is essentially limited to HEDT/server platforms.

It requires pci-e bifurcation support from motherboard, otherwise at best only one ssd would work.

On your system you'll have to use something with pci-e switch chip to get that much ssd-s working.

 

3 hours ago, Alfred_88 said:

(Since 3600XT have 24 lanes(16-4-4) I have used 16 lanes for the gpu and another 4 for my 970 evo plus

And 4 of them are used for chipset<=>cpu link, so all your cpu lanes are already used.

 

The only reasonable solution, apart from switching to HEDT, would be single large ssd. Since you have limited bandwidth available anyway multiple ssd-s will not be faster than single one no matter what.

[bowrilla]

I'm not sure I can follow you. Ryzen has indeed 24 PCIe gen4 lanes: 16 for the main/first PCIe Slot (GPU), 4 for the first/primary M.2 slot and 4 for the chipset. The chipset can and does provide additional lanes but the uplink to the CPU is limited by the 4 lines the chipset is connected with. All chipset features (WiFi, ethernet) and ports (additional USB, SATA, additional M.2) go through that and share the bandwidth. That means that the 2nd M.2 slot will share bandwidth with those features and ports resulting in potentially non-ideal performance (depends on what features are used/active and how many ports are being used). The chipset also provides additional lanes for the additional PCIe slots on the board (this is why the GPU always goes into the main/primary/first slot which is (usually) connected to the CPU directly).

 

Bottom line: 2 M.2 drives with Ryzen might (the chipset uplink is PCIe gen4 after all so those 4 lanes have almost the bandwidth of 8 gen3 lanes) result in somewhat impeded performance for the 2nd M.2 but it will work. 

 

Since the Asus hyper M.2 expansion plugs into PCIe slots it is still limited by the chipset's uplink of 4 lanes. If you plug in 4 nvme drives into that expansion card, you will at best cut their performance in half since you'd need 16 gen3 lanes but the chipset is only connected through 4 gen4 lanes which roughly equates to the bandwidth of 8 gen3 lanes. USB, sound, ethernet on top an performance will most likely drop below those 50% theoretical peak.

 

Since you only use a 1650 which definitely cannot saturate 16 gen4 lanes (probably not even 16 gen3 lanes) you could bifurcate that first PCIe port. I'm not sure about that specific mainboard and if this has an onboard option to split the lanes into 2x8 between first and second PCIe slots but you can use a special gen4 riser cable with a PCB and some PCIe switching capability to split each gen4 lane's bandwidth into 2 gebe lanes. Not sure if that exists as a mass market product.

 

I'd say: 2x2TB or 1x4TB is a wiser choice.

[SansVarnic]

-= Topics Merged =-

Please don't multipost your topics. 

[bowrilla]

11 hours ago, Archer42 said:

This card is essentially limited to HEDT/server platforms.

It requires pci-e bifurcation support from motherboard, otherwise at best only one ssd would work

B550 and x570 to my knowledge all support bifurcation, don't they?

 

8 hours ago, SansVarnic said:

= Topics Merged =-

Please don't multipost your topics. 

I'd argue this is a CPU/mainboard related question since it's about PCIe lanes and not storage devices primarily.

[Archer42]

8 hours ago, bowrilla said:

B550 and x570 to my knowledge all support bifurcation, don't they?

What this card requires is full x16 slot with lanes split into x4x4x4x4. Otherwise 4 ssd-s will not work.

I may be wrong, but IIRC what you can get with CPU lanes on AM4 is x8x8x4x4 at best, meaning x8 for GPU, x8 for second slot, x4 for m.2 and x4 for chipset. Which will mean only 1 ssd will work in said card in second "x16" slot.

With chipset lanes - while x570 theoretically has enough to implement x4x4x4x4 I do not think motherboards exist which practically do it, and also bandwidth will still be limited by cpu<=>chipset link in such case.

[bowrilla]

25 minutes ago, Archer42 said:

What this card requires is full x16 slot with lanes split into x4x4x4x4. Otherwise 4 ssd-s will not work.

I may be wrong, but IIRC what you can get with CPU lanes on AM4 is x8x8x4x4 at best, meaning x8 for GPU, x8 for second slot, x4 for m.2 and x4 for chipset. Which will mean only 1 ssd will work in said card in second "x16" slot.

With chipset lanes - while x570 theoretically has enough to implement x4x4x4x4 I do not think motherboards exist which practically do it, and also bandwidth will still be limited by cpu<=>chipset link in such case.

No. The chipset can create its own additional lanes. The uplink to the CPU is limited but that doesn't mean you can't have 4 NVMes connected to the chipset and more. This solely depends on the amount of "virtual" lanes the chipset provides. All of that is being bottlenecked but it is not limited in function.

 

And AMD's bifurcation to my knowledge goes pretty far down. It is a matter of wether a specific mainboard manufacturer implements the specific feature. I don't think it's part of the mandatory AMD CBS menu.

 

At the end of the day, it will run with poor performance.

[Archer42]

1 hour ago, bowrilla said:

No. The chipset can create its own additional lanes. The uplink to the CPU is limited but that doesn't mean you can't have 4 NVMes connected to the chipset and more. This solely depends on the amount of "virtual" lanes the chipset provides. All of that is being bottlenecked but it is not limited in function.

 

And AMD's bifurcation to my knowledge goes pretty far down. It is a matter of wether a specific mainboard manufacturer implements the specific feature. I don't think it's part of the mandatory AMD CBS menu.

 

At the end of the day, it will run with poor performance.

It does not create"virtual lanes" it just basically acts as pci-e switch with 4.0x4 uplink.

The question is - do motherboards exist which have full x16 with all 16 lanes connected to chipset? Because it is basically a requirement here. And no, as far as i know they do not.

In theory it might be possible in some configs, but practically it is not and again, to support 4 ssd-s on this card HEDT/server platform is required.

There are, however, cards with pci-e switches built in, those will work but again, will be limited by uplink speed (whatever slot you connect it to) and tend to cost something like 200-300$.