- Jul 20, 2024
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So I want to add some more fast M.2 drives on my X99 system and the PCIE Adapter boards seem the obvious route. My board supports one M.2 drive, but I would like to be able to add more. So I have poked around, reading/watching stuff on how this works, and looks like it would be fine on my system, so I am looking for a check on my research here.
So my idea is a something like the ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 4.0. (open to other/cheaper suggestions) Yes, I know my system only does PCIE 3.0, so I might be over spending on that, but being able to add more M.2 NVME drives as I can afford them, is an interesting idea. The idea would be to have the drives in the ASUS Hyper board appear as one drive or separate drives, no RAID.
My understanding of PCIE lane usage:
i7-6900K supports 40 PCIE lanes
Asus X-99 A II Motherboard supports PCIE 3.0 and 40 PCIE lanes.
The manual rather vaguely breaks down the PCIE slot/lane support like this:
GPU Cards PCIe Slot 1 PCIe Slot 3 PCIe Slot 4
1 x16
2 N/A x16 x16
3 x8 x16 x8
So by my understanding, the M.2 slot takes x4, the 1070 Ti takes 16 making at total of 20 lanes in use, with 20 more free. A ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIE 4.0 with 4 SSD drives in it would take an additional 16 leaving me with 4 remaining.
Just to show how much my work drive could use some help,
Crystal Mark rates my M.2 boot drive as:
Seq Q32T1 1810/1254
My SATA SSD work drive as:
Seq Q32T1 528/507
Spinning HD SATA
Seq Q32T1 217/211
My System:
Windows 10 22H2 19045.4651 (never going to 11, working on jumping ship to Linux)
i7-6900k @4Ghz
Asus X-99 A II Motherboard
Water cooled CPU, 96GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (8Gb) feeding three 27" monitors
Storage:
One built in M.2 NVME slot in use as the boot drive
2TB SSD Drive (SATA)
1TB SSD Drive(SATA)
Three spinning 8 TB Drives (SATA)
12TB spinning 12 TB Drive (SATA)
Offline 8TB backup drive (USB 3.1) for essentials.
The system is used for photo and video editing workstation general PC use and some gaming. Yes, I am a digital pack rat.
So my idea is a something like the ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 4.0. (open to other/cheaper suggestions) Yes, I know my system only does PCIE 3.0, so I might be over spending on that, but being able to add more M.2 NVME drives as I can afford them, is an interesting idea. The idea would be to have the drives in the ASUS Hyper board appear as one drive or separate drives, no RAID.
My understanding of PCIE lane usage:
i7-6900K supports 40 PCIE lanes
Asus X-99 A II Motherboard supports PCIE 3.0 and 40 PCIE lanes.
The manual rather vaguely breaks down the PCIE slot/lane support like this:
GPU Cards PCIe Slot 1 PCIe Slot 3 PCIe Slot 4
1 x16
2 N/A x16 x16
3 x8 x16 x8
So by my understanding, the M.2 slot takes x4, the 1070 Ti takes 16 making at total of 20 lanes in use, with 20 more free. A ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIE 4.0 with 4 SSD drives in it would take an additional 16 leaving me with 4 remaining.
Just to show how much my work drive could use some help,
Crystal Mark rates my M.2 boot drive as:
Seq Q32T1 1810/1254
My SATA SSD work drive as:
Seq Q32T1 528/507
Spinning HD SATA
Seq Q32T1 217/211
My System:
Windows 10 22H2 19045.4651 (never going to 11, working on jumping ship to Linux)
i7-6900k @4Ghz
Asus X-99 A II Motherboard
Water cooled CPU, 96GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (8Gb) feeding three 27" monitors
Storage:
One built in M.2 NVME slot in use as the boot drive
2TB SSD Drive (SATA)
1TB SSD Drive(SATA)
Three spinning 8 TB Drives (SATA)
12TB spinning 12 TB Drive (SATA)
Offline 8TB backup drive (USB 3.1) for essentials.
The system is used for photo and video editing workstation general PC use and some gaming. Yes, I am a digital pack rat.
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