M.2 NVMe Add-In Cards for Multiple Drives

[Cyanara]

Hi,

I'm trying to create a large SSD workspace in our office server to complement the very large but much slower mechanical RAID.

The problem is that I want to add at least 2 NVMe drives, but the motherboard is getting a bit overloaded. I would have to use PCIe add-in cards to accommodate them, but even the PCIe slots are very limited.

 

So rather than multiple m.2 add-in cards holding one drive each, I would like to know if there any reliable single cards that can hold 2 or more drives, and work with any normal motherboard.

 

The issues I'm finding are:

• Many of the dual cards only support 1 NVMe and 1 AHCI drive.
• Simple 'dumb' cards that don't need drivers or controllers may have trouble with more than 4 PCIe lanes? I have no problem with the drives sharing x4 speeds if that's an option (still way faster than 10Gbe), but I'm not clear on whether they can see more than one drive.
• Cards like the impressive Asus Hyper m.2 x16 card apparently use PCIe bifurcation to function, which potentially makes them very limited in compatible motherboards. I doubt the Gigabyte GA-X170-WS ECC supports that.
• It doesn't sound like SDIMMs really took off either.

Does anyone have experience or knowledge of relevant m.2 add-in cards that might be useful?

 

Thanks

[spartaman64]

what cpu are you using because you might run out of pcie lanes if you are using a lot of nvme drives at once

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2 also it looks like the m.2 standard only goes up to pcie x4 so idk if you can find an adapter that can accept multiple nvme drives

[Cyanara]

13 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

what cpu are you using because you might run out of pcie lanes if you are using a lot of nvme drives at once

Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1225 v6 (16 lanes) on C236 chipset (20 lanes). Currently the only PCIe card is a 10Gbe NIC. Then there's about 7 SATA drives, and an m.2 drive on the motherboard.

[CodeCharmer]

You might have already found a device, but I've been searching for quite a while now.  So if anyone else runs across this post, HighPoint model SSD7101A-1 is a NVMe M.2 SSD PCIe add on card using 4 lanes for 4 individual drives.  

https://www.amazon.com/High-Point-SSD7101A-1-Dedicated-Controller/dp/B073W71K4Z

 

[Cyanara]

9 hours ago, CodeCharmer said:

You might have already found a device, but I've been searching for quite a while now.  So if anyone else runs across this post, HighPoint model SSD7101A-1 is a NVMe M.2 SSD PCIe add on card using 4 lanes for 4 individual drives.  

https://www.amazon.com/High-Point-SSD7101A-1-Dedicated-Controller/dp/B073W71K4Z

 

Yeah, the project got put off a bit, but that's the device that I expect to get. Looks pretty good.