News ASRock's Blazing-Fast Card Houses Four PCIe 5.0 SSDs

[Admin]

ASRock has announced the Blazing Quad M.2 Card, an AIC that slots into a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and accommos up to four PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

ASRock's Blazing-Fast Card Houses Four PCIe 5.0 SSDs : Read more

 

[richardvday]

This is like a PR release.
Lacking in details though.
Is it hot swappable?
What raid modes are supported?
When you say fast how fast do you mean?
Probably too expensive anyway but still would be nice to know.

 

[Amdlova]

I think is a simple 4x4x4x4 card maybe some tweak in bios but I think will be raid in software... at 10.000 mb each the cpu will toast.

 

[hotaru251]

i know the real use for it is pointless, but I would still love to see RAID 0 with 4 drives just for shats & giggles.

 

[Stesmi]

Typo: 110mm, not 110m. I know SSDs can be long, but 110m (361ft) is a touch too long for my taste.

 

[jkflipflop98]

Typo: 110mm, not 110m. I know SSDs can be long, but 110m (361ft) is a touch too long for my taste.

This mental image makes me giggle.

 

[InvalidError]

Probably too expensive anyway but still would be nice to know.

It is probably just a dumb PCIe bifurcation card, should be pretty cheap. As for what it can do, that would be whatever the motherboard chipset, CPU and BIOS support depending on what slot you put it in, same goes for speed. Standard PCIe and NVMe slots and cards aren't meant to be hotswappable, so you can most likely forget about that, go U.2 if you need it.

 

[Hooda Thunkett]

Typo: 110mm, not 110m. I know SSDs can be long, but 110m (361ft) is a touch too long for my taste.

Doug Dimmsdome, owner of the Dimsdale Dimmsdome, dimmadisagrees.

 

[rjohnson11]

Sadly there are no Gen 5 M.2 SSDs on the market right now available for sale.

 

[abufrejoval]

This is like a PR release.
Lacking in details though.
Is it hot swappable?
What raid modes are supported?
When you say fast how fast do you mean?
Probably too expensive anyway but still would be nice to know.

This card literally does nothing put pass through mainboard traces to M.2 slots: think of it as a riser card.

And it doesn't add or subtract functionality: hot-swap/RAID/speeds are negotiated between the mainboard and the M.2 card controllers.

If your PCIe x16 slot offers hot-swap support and the M.2 devices support that as well, this card can be hot-swapped.

Potentially that's even true for the M.2 devices, but I wouldn't want to drop one of those tiny screws in a running system.

PCIe 3.0 variants of this type of card start at €50, PCIe 4.0 is less than €100, PCIe 5.0 might still cost premium: much cheaper than U.2 hardware, cables, drives, but not nearly as hot-swap, either.

But the real issue is reliability and the fact that the higher the bus speed the bigger the latency/quality/capacitance issues caused by every millimeter of trace wire. PCIe 5.0 mainboard vendors have to go to insane precision and PCB layer counts to achieve that, slots and connectors don't help.

U.2 will come with retimers or even controllers, premium cables, cages etc. another market entirely.

I had a cheapo PCIe 3.0 variant fail intermittendly on a server that was PCIe 3.0 on all sides: one out of four M.2 would go offline and only come back after a power cycle, but report zero errors.

Three other idential systems had no issues.

I'm swapping for a PCIe 4.0 variant in the hope of more robust signal quality.