I’m looking to add more M.2 SSDs to my Asrock X399 Taichi. I do not need Raid, just 4 extra individual drives. One could get 4 adapter cards but that would take up 4 slots. 1 16x slot would be much easier for me.
There are three cards potentially suitable:
Delock PCIe x16 IOI – 4 x M.2 Key M Nvme – Bifurcation
Asrock Ultra Quad M.2 Card
ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 Card V2 Controller
The cheapest one is the Asrock, but that is advertised as a Raid card. It’s also quite large. The compact non-Raid Delock card is more expensive.
Is the Asrock capable of what I need, or do I have to get the Delock? What advantage/disadvantage would the Asus have vs the Asrock?
Please advise, thank you!
I have the Asus one.
You’ll need your mobo to support PCIe Bifurication on the x16 port you intend to use, or only the first M.2 drive will be available. Id assume thats pretty standard on X399 boards though.
Does what it says on the tin really! Effectively just splits a x16 port into 4x x4 M.2 ports.
Thanks for the info. Does the Asus make a lot of noise, with the fan I mean? I doubt one can control it from Linux.
There’s a switch on the back for low\high\ for the fan, but I have it in a Dual Xeon system, with a 2080, so everything else is making a lot more noise! (sorry).
The card itself doesnt show up as hardware in the OS, so there’s no native fan control.
You might be able to wire up the fan to a fan controller though with some adaptor cables and control it that way. Id assume the fan is just the normal 12v.
Thanks for checking! I’ll get one after all, I found a place selling these for 44 EUR. Way cheaper than the competition. I’ll try unplugging the fan, leaving that huge cover off and sticking some mini heatsinks (the raspberry pi kind) to the nvme controllers.