Hello everyone
I’ve got a Samsung PM1725b that I use in addition to my main M.2 NVMe OS drive for everything I have, mostly games. I know it’s woefully inappropriate to use that for game storage, but please entertain me.
I currently have an ATX motherboard with an i7 6700k. I want to build a custom PC case in an HTPC style (topic for another time) and I have a question on how to connect both a GPU and this SSD with a single PCIe slot.
Option one is to use a bifurcation riser/card. The problem is here is mainly finding the right riser/card to use, in additional to normal riser cables. As far as I know, this could work, but I’d limit my GPU to x8 which isn’t an issue for my current GTX1080, but could potentially be with the next generation of Nvidia GPU’s (Yea?) which I am hoping to jump on when released.
Option two is to use an M.2 slot and adapt that to PCIe x8 (or by x4 since M.2 is only by x4?). As far as I know, M.2 connectors can supply 25w, which is the upper limit of this SSD according to its datasheet. Would this generally be fine, considering I’m not hammering it with databases/high IO jobs? I believe I can split the drive up into multiple “partitions” (I don’t recall the correct terminology for this) and use one for the OS, and the other for general storage - so I don’t need to use my other M.2 drives.
Or am I crazy, asking for problems I don’t have, and should stick to ATX/mATX?