Can I use one of these cheap adapter cards to run 4 NVME SSDs from 1 PCIe 16x slot?
1 hour ago, mrleaw said:I'm planning to get 4 NVME SSDs (for NAS Server purposes) and was wondering if my mainboard (ASUS ROG Strix Z370 H Gaming) can handle to drive all of them through a single PCIe 16x slot.
It is possible to use one slot to drive all of those drives, however as long as you have a GPU in the primary slot, there is going to be a bandwidth limitation as inserting this card into the second slot will probably drive the speed of both slots to x8/x8. This already reduces the available bandwidth for your GPU as well as for this card, as what would be possible would only be 4 x M.2 PCIe 3.0 x2. Still, even that would require a motherboard that supports PCIe bifurcation.
There is a certain limit of bandwidth that both the CPU and the Chipset provide to the motherboard ports, it is not advised to shoot too close to that limit and it's definitely not the case that all of the ports can run at their maximum bandwidth at once.
Another thing is that if you use such a "cheap" card, it doesn't have a hardware RAID controller of any kind, so all RAID is purely software in this case. This has both upsides and downsides.
You could run two drives from the onboard M.2 slots and the other two from the add-on 2 x m.2 card, although you'd need to check your motherboard manual if anything gets disabled if the secondary onboard M.2 slot is populated, as well as what kind of bandwidth that slot supports. Mixing all of that into a RAID is not an optimal solution, although a software RAID should still work.
For such configurations people usually turned to HEDT platforms due to those having a lot more available PCIe lanes for devices like M.2's and were better suited for RAID.
I guess you'd need to specify your needs better and evaluate from there what solution you actually require. Maybe a better solution would be to buy a dedicated NAS like a small Synology or QNAP?
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