Looking for an M.2 carrier card with PLX (4x M.2 on x16, no RAID)

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

foureight84

Active Member
Jun 26, 2018
266
240
43
I did buy that supermicro card after I switched board to an Asus x99e ws. It's fantastic! For the price the performance is great. Here's the overall benchmark.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/17353576

If you can afford to shell out $450, highpoint just released a new x16 nvme bootable raid card. I'm not sure what the performance of that. I had the non-bootable one before but did have enough pcie lanes to run at full capacity so I sold it. It was getting about 5000mb/s.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
I assumed PCIe meant NVMe but you are right, it isn’t explicitly called out. The benchmark screenshot shown is with 6 Samsung 970 pros though which are NVMe based. I also didn’t think NF1 was SATA compatible which it supports too.

It sells for $768.45 plus shipping for this curious.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
I've tried a number of Supermicro cards in my X10SDV 1541 and 1587, both with and without PLX chip. With NVMe HGST something or others, and Intel P3700s I had trouble getting drives recognized by the BIOS and ESXi. I worked with supermicro but as they weren't not he support list there was no support. The card you linked is I think the only one I didn't try. Just make sure you order from somewhere you can return etc.
 

ullbeking

Active Member
Jul 28, 2017
506
70
28
45
London
I've tried a number of Supermicro cards in my X10SDV 1541 and 1587, both with and without PLX chip. With NVMe HGST something or others, and Intel P3700s I had trouble getting drives recognized by the BIOS and ESXi. I worked with supermicro but as they weren't not he support list there was no support. The card you linked is I think the only one I didn't try. Just make sure you order from somewhere you can return etc.
Have you tried the following?
  • Quad-port AOC-SHG3-4M2P adapter with connections to at least two (x4) M.2 NVMe SSD's
  • Quad-port OCuLink AOC-SLG3-4E2P adapter with connections to at least two (x4) U.2 2.5" NVMe SSD's
I think each of the above has a PLX switch.

I need one of each for servers that don't support lane bifurcation.

Edit: There are a few other manufacturers, which I discovered after a very long web search and asking around, who also make such PLX switch-based adapters. Some are _very_ expensive. Others are brands I don't know. All-in-all, the SM options looked like the best compromise between range, price, and quality.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: BrianAz

elag

Member
Dec 1, 2018
79
14
8
anybody tried the AOC-SHG3-4M2P on a board that does not support bi-furcation?
Does it support Intel Optane M10 (only 2 lanes)? If so, that card might be interesting to be able add 2*Optane 32G zlog to my server....
 

Vit K

Member
Feb 23, 2017
88
30
18
Simple adapters:
Linkreal Dual PCIe 3.0 x8 to M.2 NVMe Adapter - $35
Linkreal Quad PCIe 3.0 x16 to M.2 NVMe Adapter - $70
on Aliexpress
 

Kev

Active Member
Feb 16, 2015
461
111
43
41
So I got the QM2-4P-384 and now I’m sporting 4 NVMe drives in my 1u SM Atom C3000 series mobo.

One thing is that this card uses the asmedia PCIe switch and in ESXi, it doesn’t pass the ACS check so you can’t pass the devices to VMs but if you disable ACS check, everything is okay. Currently have two 970 evo pros passes to omv running zfs.
 

Kev

Active Member
Feb 16, 2015
461
111
43
41
Here are some pictures of the card installed in my server:




In the end, I could not put the DC P4801X on the motherboard's dedicated x4 m.2 slot because the server would hang at MRC 0x2f boot code. I put the optane on the QNAP card and created a datastore, passed a 8GB disk to my VM and did a quick benchmark.