• Happy holidays, folks! Thanks to each and every one of you for being part of the Tom's Hardware community!

Question Dual Nvme - Expansion Card - for a Z97A

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
TheWhiteRose000

TheWhiteRose000

Distinguished
Jul 10, 2010
342
0
18,780
I am looking for an Expansion card for a Z97A MSI Gaming 6 motherboard, does one even exist? I have been studying for hours and looking but can't come up with something solid.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
You could always put one into the dedicated M.2 slot and then put the video editing one into a M.2 to PCIe add in card, which should be fairly cheap. You'll lose performance for the one in the M.2 slot, but you probably won't really much real world difference.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
TJ Hooker said:
You could always put one into the dedicated M.2 slot and then put the video editing one into a M.2 to PCIe add in card, which should be fairly cheap. You'll lose performance for the one in the M.2 slot, but you probably won't really much real world difference.
Click to expand...

Well, the thing with that was the board's M.2 slot disables two sata slots, and lowers the speed of my PCIe to 8x while still only maintaining the speed of a M.2 gen 2 speed,
I went and got an adapter to maximum the speed of the NVME drive, and after my initial studies I've concluded that the only cards with a dual NMVE M.2 port is for servers, or MUCH newer systems.

But the adaptor card also comes with a SATA m.2 also, so probably just invest into a single M.2 Sata down the road this way I can still push my board pretty solid without much compromise.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You want 4x HDD.
Your motherboard has 4x SATA ports.

I know why you think you need to connect these via a PCIe card or whatever.
But that is a mistaken concept.

Performance depends on the slowest device in the chain. Here, the actual spinning drives.
Connecting a spinning drive to anything faster than a SATA II connection brings exactly zero performance gain.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
TheWhiteRose000 said:
I'm going off when the forums said,
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=282545.0
Click to expand...
No one in that thread is saying that using the M.2 slot will reduce the bandwidth of the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot...

Using a PCIe add in card for the SSD will result in maximum bandwidth for the SSD, at the expense of bandwidth to the PCIe x16 slot (although most GPUs aren't really affected by x8 vs x16 bandwidth).
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
TJ Hooker said:
No one in that thread is saying that using the M.2 slot will reduce the bandwidth of the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot...

Using a PCIe add in card for the SSD will result in maximum bandwidth for the SSD, at the expense of bandwidth to the PCIe x16 slot (although most GPUs aren't really affected by x8 vs x16 bandwidth).
Click to expand...

I may have misread, but it still looks like the estimated throughput is going to be capped at PCIe 2.0 speeds at 800mbs using a nvme card.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
With that card there should be virtually no difference in between x8 and x16. If you want the best storage speeds you can get for video editing, there shouldn't be any major drawback to using a PCIe add in card adapter (other than the cost of buying the adapter).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
TJ Hooker said:
With that card there should be virtually no difference in between x8 and x16. If you want the best storage speeds you can get for video editing, there shouldn't be any major drawback to using a PCIe add in card adapter (other than the cost of buying the adapter).
Click to expand...
Ah, so the same process I had prior then, just run it at 8x with the adapter for maximum speed and efficiency, I'm guessing though if I had a 2080ti, it would be a different story though?
Or if I decided off handedly to do a CrossFire it would be better than all the ports being at 4x speeds?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom