Enough lanes for everything I want to do?

[Keltheris]

Hey guys,

I'm building a new PC after 5 years and I'm looking to see if I have enough PCIe lanes for my storage solution. I'm looking at getting a z270 Mobo with an i7-7700k and wanted to used 2 M.2's raid 0 and then get a HDD to use as a backup system. I might get an additional HDD some point down the road and raid 1 them.

I've never been so hardcore when building to look at lanes but I just ran across it today and it's completely boggled my mind. At this point I've learned (I think) that these storage devices will use the chipset lanes and from my research the z270 has 30 lanes. What confuses me is that these lanes aren't completely free for whatever? If not do you guys know how many lanes I'll have available to me to use for my storage?

 

[jwcrellin]

i7 7700k has 24 lanes and z270 adds another 4. M.2 slots share bandwidth with a sata port so installing 2 m.2 slots will reduce your available sata ports by 2. Many people have done dual m.2 raid 0 and get super fast bootable drives. You should be fine, just read your mobo manual to see which sata ports get de-activated.

 

[Rogue Leader]

i7 7700k has 24 lanes and z270 adds another 4. M.2 slots share bandwidth with a sata port so installing 2 m.2 slots will reduce your available sata ports by 2. Many people have done dual m.2 raid 0 and get super fast bootable drives. You should be fine, just read your mobo manual to see which sata ports get de-activated.

No it does not.

The i7-7700k has 16 PCIe lanes that are reserved for the GPU slots in Z270 boards.

https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz

Z270 has 24 lanes in its PCH, and while some are reserved for system devices like the SATA ports, you will have no problem running 2 PCIe x4 drives on 8 of those lanes. They are available on most boards that have 2 M.2 slots (just double check the specs to be sure it depends on the boards config).

As for RAID 0 of 2 NVMe drives? Absolute waste of money. While you will be a benchmark hero it has almost zero bearing on real world performance. Unless you spend all day copying files.

 

[jwcrellin]

Okay, I misunderstood the +4 but I was right about the 24 lanes. That means that there's enough for x16 graphic and a pair of x4 nvme drives.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Okay, I misunderstood the +4 but I was right about the 24 lanes. That means that there's enough for x16 graphic and a pair of x4 nvme drives.

Still incorrect. Theres a total of 36 lanes. The GPUs do not use any of the 24 lanes that the Z270 motherboard has.

16 of them come from the CPU and are dedicated to the GPU slot(s). The other 24 are for all the other system devices such as the SATA ports, the other PCIe slots, and the M.2 slots.