I would love to see you guys do something cool with this!
Sorry, i don't know all the ins and outs of this forum
http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-4-m-2-ssd-modules/
(I went ahead and moved this to the HDD's and SSD's section because that covers this kind of kit, feel free to move it if you don't think that's appropriate.)
Is this a hardware raid of 4 M.2's or is it just an adapter to make 4 individual M.2 drives accessible to the OS? I'm reading it more as the later, somewhat of a beefed up one of these:
I doubt it does any kind of raid as NVMe so far has not been cracked for any kind of hardware raid, only in-OS raid like inside windows disk management for example.
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The description says:
PCI Express Carrier Board supports x4 PCI Express Gen 3 connection to each M.2 circuit.
That implies to me that it appears as four individual M.2 drives and not as a hardware RAID of the four drives.
It also mentions this though:
Carrier Board is located in the middle of the PCI Express slot and can be connected to motherboard PCI Express connector via exchangeable x16 or x8 PCI Express upstream Adapter.
I don't know what an upstream adapter is. Never heard of it.
Is this for software RAID, should get some serious numbers if possible with the OS. A fefw months ago, some machines would not boot from NVMe.
@thecaveman I would've put it in the hdd and ssd section but I really would like to see a video on this. I don't have the ends to get one of these let alone populate it but I would love to live vicariously through a hardware review video :) this is cool
I don't think you can raid it but if you could that would be stupid fast.
Might be in reference to one of those massive server boxes that is just full of fast PCIE storage for use in I/O intensive uses. I saw somewhere a box (idk to call this a standalone server or what) full of pcie connections, that were all meant to be populated with PCIE storage, and then this box had a fiber / pcie / something link to a master server that controlled all the storage. The box itself just had some controllers to generate the PCIE and keep everything basically organized, but was CPU-less and left that work to the master server. I really wish I could find that again, think it was a PCPER write up.
This isn't the exact article, I had found a full review, but the later end of this news piece has some stuff:
https://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/FMS-2016-Supermicro-All-Flash-NVMe-Systems-Switching-PCIe-48-SSDs
ALSO
Apparently, Broadcom isn't completely useless as I thought and actually has came up with a NVMe Hardware Raid controller:
What's interesting about that article is that its actually being used in a "bottlenecked" scenario. They're using PCIE 2.0, and there is more performance left on the table because of that. They're also using OS X, which inhibits the use of NVMe based M.2 drives. They're using the original Samsung SM951 AHCI version, which I actually have one of. The problem with AHCI is that there are far fewer commands that can be sent to the drive, and thus lesser performance. AHCI though does have better compatibility with older or legacy systems, as the protocol is in itself kind of legacy to some degree. What I want to see is one of these adapters (or even just four individual drives) filled with Samsung 960 Pro's. Theoretically you could have over 13GBps read speeds in software raid 0! It would make my SM951 and Plextor M8Pe look like childs play!