News MSI's M.2 add-in card looks like a GPU, sports two hot-swap PCIe Gen 5 SSD slots

[Admin]

MSI unveiled a new PCIe-based M.2 expansion card at Computex this year, featuring two PCIe NVMe Gen 5 drive bays that are hot-swappable and cooled by a single large GPU cooler fan.

MSI's M.2 add-in card looks like a GPU, sports two hot-swap PCIe Gen 5 SSD slots : Read more

 

[nightbird321]

Surprised no MB has built them into the I/O shield, could be a killer feature.

 

[Eximo]

Surprised no MB has built them into the I/O shield, could be a killer feature.

Tricky. There are a lot of I/O connections and traces taking up space right there. The stacked m.2 slots on some Mini-ITX boards is closer to that idea.

 

[thestryker]

Unfortunately things like this are virtually useless on consumer platforms unless you don't plan on using a video card. Previous iterations required bifurcation support and there's no reason to believe this would be any different.

Intel only allows a single split of CPU lanes so even if you had two PCIe 5.0 slots it wouldn't matter as only one SSD would be recognized in the second. On the AMD side of things it's better, but you have to have two PCIe 5.0 slots and proper motherboard support.

If the bifurcation was handled on the card it'd be an infinitely more compelling product, but would also likely cost a lot more and have lower margins. Thanks Broadcom!

 

[BelowTheL1ne]

People who say this is useless replace too many pc's too soon. Give me fans or give me blue screen of death!

 

[yc1]

When you're ssd gets so hot it needs a fan maybe they need to make ssds run cooler first before pcie 6.0 or they will have a pentium 4 type of disaster on there hands

 

[ezst036]

Most ATX motherboards these days seem to have only 1 or 2 16x PCIe slots, making it not usable unless you seek out a board with more slots.

Or give up your GPU.

 

[Li Ken-un]

I’m surprised MSI beat Icy Dock to the punch on a product such as this. Icy Dock doesn’t even have one on their concept page. Although they have plenty for the E3.S/E1.S form factors, which makes sense as M.2 wasn’t even designed for hot swap in the first place.

 

[wr3zzz]

Unfortunately things like this are virtually useless on consumer platforms unless you don't plan on using a video card. Previous iterations required bifurcation support and there's no reason to believe this would be any different.

Intel only allows a single split of CPU lanes so even if you had two PCIe 5.0 slots it wouldn't matter as only one SSD would be recognized in the second. On the AMD side of things it's better, but you have to have two PCIe 5.0 slots and proper motherboard support.

If the bifurcation was handled on the card it'd be an infinitely more compelling product, but would also likely cost a lot more and have lower margins. Thanks Broadcom!

^This

It's lazy reporting like this article led to me wasting money on a PCIe NVMe card. Every Tom's article of similar products failed to include this above information. I only found out from reading the MB manual after the card disabled my onboard NVMe.

 

[thisisaname]

A solution looking for a problem?

 

[t3t4]

Well that's kinda cool/er, literally. While I have no need for such a thing at the moment, I do like the idea of adding gen5 support like this and being able to keep the drives actually cool. This looks like a pretty cool add on card to me.

 

[Amdlova]

I have a 22110 enterprise ssd on my system...
Very thick I don't think will fit on that small role...
But is a nice product when you have a spare 8x pcie.

 

[Rouxenator]

The GPU was a cool story when Voodoo first told it. But it's 30 years later now and needs to stop. The future is APU. Stop feeding the nvidia troll people.

 

[newtechldtech]

Still waiting for this to become Laptops STANDARD.

 

[newtechldtech]

I’m surprised MSI beat Icy Dock to the punch on a product such as this. Icy Dock doesn’t even have one on their concept page. Although they have plenty for the E3.S/E1.S form factors, which makes sense as M.2 wasn’t even designed for hot swap in the first place.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hot-swap-m2-nvme-ssd-icy-dock

 

[Li Ken-un]

I’m surprised MSI beat Icy Dock to the punch on a product such as this. Icy Dock doesn’t even have one on their concept page. Although they have plenty for the E3.S/E1.S form factors, which makes sense as M.2 wasn’t even designed for hot swap in the first place.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hot-swap-m2-nvme-ssd-icy-dock

I know about these. They’re not PCIe 5.0. None of their concept products are for PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs.