How to add NVME drives to my MB that has no spare pcie x8 slot?

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jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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I see a lot of Datacenter drives selling for cheap because it is second hand.

I am using X11SSZ supermicro board. It has 1 pcie x16, 2 pcie x4 in a x8 slot.

Pcie x16 os used by GPU. I believe x4 is not enough for 2 NVME drives?

Is there any controller that can allow me to connect nvme drives, 2 of them, on an electrically x4 slot? Won't it be a bottleneck?
 
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Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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In general:
X4 will be enough for all nvme drives up to current generation although Optane drives are limited by it already.
There are also some x2 nvme drives (usually M.2) which are limited in speed and are used for client systems mostly (as the number of spare pcie lanes on consumer (Core/E3) boards are limited)

Those drives in particular are not nvme drives, they are PCI-e SSDs which are 4 single drives (200gb each) which are used via a built in LSI controller.
They have been discussed quite often in this forum, so you might want to read up on those (either F80 or F40 which are identical only smaller)
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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X4 will be enough for all nvme drives up to current generation although Optane drives are limited by it already.
The (pcie) optanes are currently limited by the controller that sits between 3dxpoint and pcie lanes of the cpu.
x4 should give you about ~3.9 gbyte/s throughput, but the optanes cap around 2.7 gbytes reading and 2.5 gbyte/s writing