News Icy Dock unveils 4-bay M.2 adapter for PCIe 5.0 SSDs: up to 56 GB/s

[Admin]

Icy Dock reveals ExpressSlot MB204MP-B adapter for four M.2-2280 SSDs.

Icy Dock unveils 4-bay M.2 adapter for PCIe 5.0 SSDs: up to 56 GB/s : Read more

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

I use an Icy Dock SATA/SAS backplane in my NAS and have a ZFS array on a bunch of Samsung Evo SSDs. It’s an incredible solution and a very nice product. I’d prefer if the drives were accessible from outside the chassis, but given that m.2 nvme isn’t hot-swappable anyway, it’s not a huge loss.

 

[Amdlova]

Very cool design

 

[toffty]

I love the idea and I really kind of want to buy.... but newegg has this at $500 US and that's quite a bit more than I'm willing to spend when all it's really doing is re-routing wires.

This may also be an early scalper trying to make a quick buck https://www.newegg.com/p/35G-006J-00006

 

[ClancyWiggum]

4 way slot bifurcation is actually fairly common on consumer platforms, it's just that you lose your GPU slot in most cases (I've got a passive gen 4 bifurcation card I've used on Zen 3), and with so few PCIe lanes left there's not many use cases for that kind of speed with just a standard desktop CPU for compute.

 

[8086]

I wish MFGRs would go back to giving us plenty of PCI-e x16 slots at the expense of m.2 this way, users who want or need more m.2 can simply use a card like the icy dock or similar. And those of us who don't need more than 1 or 2 NVME drives can use the x16 slots for other things.

A great mobo example of this is the MSI X570 Godlike vs The X670 Godlike.

 

[twotwotwo]

Niche, but you could do worse if you want to sling 16 TB of data to and fro in a hurry.

I had thought this was the first of these cards with PCIe 5, but, huh, it turns out Asus has had one out for $80 for a while ("ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 Card"). Neat!

 

[thestryker]

4 way slot bifurcation is actually fairly common on consumer platforms

*AMD, Intel doesn't do 4 way.

I love the idea and I really kind of want to buy.... but newegg has this at $500 US and that's quite a bit more than I'm willing to spend when all it's really doing is re-routing wires.

This may also be an early scalper trying to make a quick buck https://www.newegg.com/p/35G-006J-00006

That might be a little high, but honestly their stuff is usually quite expensive. They have a 2 drive one (MB842MP-B) where the drives come out the PCIe bracket side and it was a fair bit over $200 when I'd looked. Everything I've used from Icy Dock has been good, but their really interesting stuff tends to carry a price premium.

 

[Logorithmic]

For the broadest adoption, the card needs hardware raid, and organic bifurcation. Something like the competitors:​

Apex Storage X16​

https://www.apexstoragedesign.com/apex-storage-x16-gen5

Apex Storage X21
https://www.apexstoragedesign.com/apexstoragex21

Sonnet's M.2 8x4 Silent https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-8x4-pcie-card/overview.html

HighPoint's 8x m.2 port SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16. https://www.highpoint-tech.com/product-page/ssd7540 combined with Sabrent's Rocket 5 (m.2 Gen5) https://sabrent.com/products/sb-rkt5-4tb​

OWC Accelsior 8M2
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2