I’ve got two 2tb nvme gen 4 drives, but I would like a chunk of larger working space for large video files (300-600gb ).
4tb nvme drives striped in the Hyper card could yield a larger volume, or go with a U.2 drive of higher capacity ( 8tb + ).
The 4tb gen 4x4 nvme drive are around $700-999
the U.2 7.68 are around 1300+
I guess the U.2 would have somewhat slower speed but have the benefit of a single volume and no raid overhead.
The cost is sort of a wash.
A regular 8tb ssd would be much less expensive or gen3 nvme be about the same cost as the U.2 but somewhat slower.
(Note: A V2 revision of this backplane has been announced, maybe PCIe Gen4 SSDs are going to be less of an issue then)
I got the V1 and while Samsung PM1733 Gen4 U.2 SSDs work fine with their full speeds, it throws PCIe errors when under full load depending how well the cables are plugged into their sockets and how well they are shielded.
An example benchmark screenshot on a Ryzen 3000 system with the backplane where I went looking into how to maybe prevent the PCIe errors from happening at all with extra shielding of the connectors and cables.
I have extensively molested poor @wendell with this, don’t know if this topic might get also addressed in a video like the AMD chipset RAID stuff but my DIY solutions with copper tape and glueing the connectors in place with a very thinn layer of epoxy so that the cable connections are always “under pressure” and can never become loose in any way were not something that could be recommended to less lunatic users…
(According to Wendell… )
Here is a lamentable experiment with connecting the backplane to an ordinary M.2-PCIe slot:
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