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News Over $23,000 Worth of Sabrent SSDs Deliver 168TB at 31 GB/s

Now only if there was some kind of imposer or device that could then say use the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0, but have 4.0 devices like this connected to it. So even though each device would still be 4.0, could utilize the speed of 5.0. Yea you could just use 5.0 drives, but what would be the fun in creating that device then.
 
Really impressive... imagine now one bad stick....
It will be a nightmare
What happens if you have a bad sector on a single SSD? The software maps around it. If the drivers for this module are any good they will incorporate bad-sector, bad-drive and even bad pcie-lane logic. Some users might even set this us as RAID using 2 or more boards in a single system.
 
Now only if there was some kind of imposer or device that could then say use the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0, but have 4.0 devices like this connected to it. So even though each device would still be 4.0, could utilize the speed of 5.0. Yea you could just use 5.0 drives, but what would be the fun in creating that device then.
Well and why use PCIe 4.0 devices when you are bandwidth constrained on the host link: I really like the idea of recycling four of my PCIe 3.0 1TB NVMe devices into one 4TB drive delivering PCIe 5.0 bandwidth in pretty much a 2.5" form factor that connects to an M.2 socket on the board via a ribbon cable.

To my understanding PCIe switches do store-and-forward processing of packets, not just lane switching, so aggregating bandwidths should be possible. But since I've never seen that anywhere, I'm not very sure I got the theory right.

Yet the single most important obstacle to all of this seems the economy, because PCIe switch chips are crazy expensive, even more so if they support PCIe 5.0.

And those prices again are something I just don't understand because the IOD in a Ryzen SoC is essentially such a PCIe switch (and does even more stuff like Infinity Fabric, DRAM, USB, SATA) yet can be had with a hexacore Ryzen 5 5600 CPU included for around €100.
 
Clear to me that $23,000 is a small price to pay, for having my ProxMox and TrueNas lab load a bit quicker. Mercifully, through blind luck, my DogeCoin and BTC gains have been substantial, so I can help Sabrent test this, without my wife or children even noticing the purchase. The wife does get angry when I bring in hardware that makes noise, such as recent servers from HPE. Besides, even if she does notice, I make the money in this family, she can go pound sand.
 

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