2.5" SSD PCIe Expansion Card Thoughts & Suggestions?

[CrankyMeatball]

I'm looking into moving my two 2.5" SSDs off of cables and instead onto a PCIe expansion card/s. Why? Because I want to.

 

I've already done some research, and so far I have narrowed down what I have found to these four options:

1. Sonnet Tempo (https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-Technologies-Tempo-Drives-TSATA6-SSD-E2/dp/B0096P62G6)
2. Sonnet Fusion (https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-Fusion-Dual-2-5-inch-RAID/dp/B084294HF9)
3. Sedna Dual SSD Adapter (https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Express-Extended-Connector-Included/dp/B07L5SPWNV)
4. OWC Accelsior (https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Accelsior-PCIe-Adapter-Drives/dp/B00WUZPMHE)

Ultimately if I go through with this:

1. I don't want totally gimp my SSDs. Sure I'm using this for a home PC where realistically I hardly ever, if ever, use the full capabilities of the SSDs, but it still matters to me.
2. I don't want to pay too much.

So based off of my understanding of the cards, SATA III, and PCIe, I've come up with this comparison:

(I used 600 MB/s as the max theoretical bandwidth of SATA III)

 

My conclusion from the comparison is:

• Sonnet Tempo is the best single slot solution for cost.
• The Sonnet Fusion is the best single slot solution for performance, while being the most expensive (though its $/bandwidth is actually pretty great).
• The Sedna Dual SSD Adapter is a good choice if I'm not worried about performance when using both cards at once.
• The OWC Accelsior is a great deal, but only if I'm ok with using two slots.

So, my questions for this thread are:

1. Did I correctly understand SATA III, PCIe, and the cards/are there any errors in my comparison?
2. What would others do in my shoes? Get one of these four (and if so which one?), or is there some better product out there I didn't find?

 

Thanks!

								0.05

 

[AbydosOne]

6 minutes ago, CrankyMeatball said:

What would others do in my shoes?

Not do this.

 

Have you checked if any support booting? (I'm assuming you're booting from at least one of those drives) Getting arbitrary PCIe cards to boot can be a royal pain. 

[HelloPeople]

10 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Not do this.

 

I almost choked .

 

 

[CrankyMeatball]

39 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Have you checked if any support booting? (I'm assuming you're booting from at least one of those drives) Getting arbitrary PCIe cards to boot can be a royal pain. 

I have a separate NVME boot drive. So supporting booting is not a concern.

[CrankyMeatball]

20 minutes ago, candle86 said:

What advantage are you hoping to gain, the controller will remain SATA each drive will remain capped at the SATA III Transfer rates, thats in the controller, you can get an increase in speed via Raid 0.

2 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

Not do this.

 

Have you checked if any support booting? (I'm assuming you're booting from at least one of those drives) Getting arbitrary PCIe cards to boot can be a royal pain. 

 

There are only a few reasons to use a standalone PCIe card for SATA drives.

 

You need more SATA ports than your board supports

Your Board supports an older SATA Standard and you want to upgrade to SATA III, this isn't relevant since P67 which only had 2 SATA III ports

Your SATA ports are in some way damaged or the board is malfunctioning

 

Outside of that you gain nothing

 

I'm not hoping to gain any speed or performance advantage. If anything, I'm fully aware that doing this will likely result in less performance for these SSDs.

 

If you're genuinely curious about why I want to do this, I guess the reasoning would be the following. Ever since I built this PC (my first!) I've never been a fan of the cabling required for my 2.5" SSDs. The connectors feel flimsy and prone to breaking. I find it annoying that I needed two cables per drive. I also found it annoying that the cables I'm using (included with my motherboard and PSU) are way too long for what I need and have more connectors on them than I need.

 

Is that all relatively silly and more subjective than objective? Yes.

 

Are there other solutions to these annoyances? Yes, I could:

• Get different cables, with custom length and only the number of connectors I need (only a partial solution in my opinion)
• Get a motherboard with more than one m.2 slot and then buy more m.2 drives
• Get a m.2 PCIe expansion card and then buy more m.2 drives

All of those still cost money though, epecially the second option. And ultimately, I do have data on my two 2.5" SSDs, and I continue to have more data over time, so why chuck them or sell them if there's a not totally awful solution to my current issues with them that won't break the bank.

 

Perhaps you have an additional idea for me that could help with the silly annoyances I feel towards how I'm currently using these drives. If you do, I'm more than happy to listen, learn, and evaluate. Otherwise, any help on figuring out which card to choose or double checking my evaluations of the cards would also be helpful.