Hello friends,
I may have asked a few weeks ago with no traction, but trying again here.
I have an ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T board.
Want to add high-speed USB options. But all cards I found do not use a lot of PCIe lanes in the first place and only supply a fraction of the theoretically possible bandwidth. And none of them seem to be PCIe 4.0.
e.g.
Has 20GBPs total, but its 2x10GBPs shared between two sets of ports.
Or
which has one USB 3.2 2x2 only.
those are a bit better - but also seems to only deliver 10GBPs per port:
It baffles me that it seems so difficult to find anything that actually utilizes the PCIe bandwidth and possible lanes and full USB bandwidth per connector.
I hope someone here has some “smarter” solutions in mind?
Bonus points:
Thunderbolt 3 or 4 for AMD Epyc boards - did anybody make it work reasonably well?
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005414052743.html
Something like a boatload of these?
I’d say it’s possible, even probable, that there’s really just not enough demand for a card to do 8x20Gbps over USB. I have a lot of trouble even imagining what that could be for. External NVME drives? Why do you need all 8 of them to be full speed at the same time?
It feels to me like it’s something where, if you need this kind of connectivity and bandwidth, USB isn’t the way to do it. Would even go so far as to say modern high-speed USB standards have very little place in the mainstream market as is, and mostly only make sense for external GPU docks that actually just use it as a PCIE passthrough device anyway, and would make more sense to have an actual PCIE passthrough standard for it, rather than piggybacking off the flaky type-C connectors.
There is a lot you could use it for. There is also not much middle ground.
E.g. a multi-card where 2 ports have 20gbps and the rest have 10 gbps each would be good too.
Found something more “extreme” - but there seems to be no middle ground option.
Generally, the multiple controllers on single PCIE cards are pretty expensive because very few even bother to make them, even for just two 10gb controller models. So $450 for an 8 port all 20gb USB-c with full bandwidth across all ports over multiple controllers is a decent price.