Neat drive carrier thing I found on Amazon

[Bfuqua]

So I had this thing advertised to me and I was fascinated by it. 

 

It's a hot swappable NVMe drive carrier on a PCIe card

 

It gives you swappable drive bays like what you'd get in a dedicated NAS or server chassis. 

 

I don't know if this is weird or interesting to anyone else, but I've never seen anything like it. I could see it having some pretty unique utility. 

 

Just thought it was cool and figured I'd share it. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Interesting.

 

This is pretty much what U.2 was designed for, so servers could have hotswappable PCIe storage.

[tkitch]

Icy Dock makes really cool stuff like this, and REALLY GOOD stuff.

 

Downside:  your motherboard needs PCIE Bifurcation to run it, which is /not/ the most common feature in normal boards.

[Bfuqua]

7 minutes ago, tkitch said:

Icy Dock makes really cool stuff like this, and REALLY GOOD stuff.

 

Downside:  your motherboard needs PCIE Bifurcation to run it, which is /not/ the most common feature in normal boards.

Yeah I saw where it said that bifurcation was needed, but starting a new build with that in mind, it shouldn't be too hard to find a motherboard that has it.

 

Sucks if you have an existing system that doesn't though. 

 

Good to know they make good stuff. I might have to check them out. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

27 minutes ago, Bfuqua said:

Yeah I saw where it said that bifurcation was needed, but starting a new build with that in mind, it shouldn't be too hard to find a motherboard that has it.

Problem is, its usually only on the top PCIe slot where you normally have a GPU.

 

I found a really nice adapter on Amazon that has 2xNVMe slots and then passes through an 8x so you can also use a half-height card on it at the same time.  Of course I then realised the motherboard in my server doesn't support bifurcation.

 

A lot of the boards that DO support bifurcation, have it hard-wired to another x16 slot on the board itself, rather than letting you split the top slot with an adapter.  They're also the expensive top-end boards.