Just wanted to share some information with the wonderful folks on STH forums. I stumbled on this about nine months ago by accident digging in aliexpress. There are adapters being sold by two Chinese domestic market companies that allow multiple NVMe drives on the same slot without requiring bifurcation. This has value for folks that have Ryzen or LGA115x/1200 Intel systems and want a lot of NVMe connectivity these systems would not otherwise offer. This is in lieu of moving up to HEDT (Ryzen Threadripper, Haswell-E[P]/Broadwell-E[P]/Skylake-E[P]/etc) and using a card like ASUS Hyper M.2 with bifurcation enabled.
These cards are using PLX controllers. I have one in my Ryzen 3900X system on ASUS Prime X470-PRO that is hooked to 3x 2TB Intel P3500 in software RAID 0 on Win10. It has worked very smoothly for about nine months. I get about 5GB/s write and about 4.5GB/s read using Blackmagicdesign's Disk Speed Test. Not too shabby. I couldn't be happier with the results and the price was not too tough to deal with.
The companies are LinkReal and Ceacent. Some others are being added periodically like DIE WU.
Generally speaking, cards that bottleneck down to a x8 interface should be fine for most people using these. Most folks running these systems will probably have a x16 graphics card in the first slot and then plugging this into a secondary slot will put both slots in x8 mode. This also has some use in older X9 servers (and similar) that don't support bifurcation.
Background information on the PCIe switches used in below cards
PEX 8724
PEX 8725
PEX 8747
PEX 8748
PEX 8749
ASM1812 (beware PCIe Gen2)
PM8533
U.2 cards
x8 2-port (PLX PEX 8724)
x8 2-port (PLX PEX 8747)
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724, this is the card I have)
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724, another PCB design)
x16 4-port (PLX PEX 8747)
x16 8-port (PLX PEX 8749)
x16 8-port (PLX PEX 8748)
M.2 cards
x8 dual carrier (PLX PEX 8724)
x8 dual carrier (PLX PEX 8747)
x8 dual carrier (Asmedia ASM1812)
x16 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8747, low profile/double sided)
x8 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8725, full profile)
x16 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8747, full profile)
x16 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8748, full profile)
Oculink cards
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724 per @vintagehardware, reported working but some trouble with micron 9200 max)
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724)
SlimSAS (SFF-8654)
x16 4-port (Micro Chip PM8533, supports 8 SSDs)
These companies carry other stuff in their stores too that is pretty handy but not super relevant to above use case, but tangentially relevant (e.g. bifurcation-required carriers, non-bifurcation multi-oculink cards, non-bifurcation slimsas nvme cards, etc).
I'm not aware of any non-CDM companies selling cards with these PCIe switches on them, with the exception of the extremely overpriced $300+ Rocketraid quad-m.2 carriers (at that rate, just move up to HEDT). There are other far-inferior solutions such as the QNAP cards as well, but... there's really no reason to buy those when the above cards exist.
Happy to edit the post and add more information/other products/other companies if other members have input.
Specific to my card:
This shows up as a PCI-to-PCI Bridge in device manager on Windows 10 (PCI\VEN_10B5&DEV_8724). No special drivers were required.
I've attached a few pictures I took when testing it out on an Ubuntu test bench (Ivy Bridge), some pictures of how it shows up in Windows, and some benchmarks. Benchmarks were taken on the Ryzen 3900X system mentioned earlier.
These cards are using PLX controllers. I have one in my Ryzen 3900X system on ASUS Prime X470-PRO that is hooked to 3x 2TB Intel P3500 in software RAID 0 on Win10. It has worked very smoothly for about nine months. I get about 5GB/s write and about 4.5GB/s read using Blackmagicdesign's Disk Speed Test. Not too shabby. I couldn't be happier with the results and the price was not too tough to deal with.
The companies are LinkReal and Ceacent. Some others are being added periodically like DIE WU.
Generally speaking, cards that bottleneck down to a x8 interface should be fine for most people using these. Most folks running these systems will probably have a x16 graphics card in the first slot and then plugging this into a secondary slot will put both slots in x8 mode. This also has some use in older X9 servers (and similar) that don't support bifurcation.
Background information on the PCIe switches used in below cards
PEX 8724
PEX 8725
PEX 8747
PEX 8748
PEX 8749
ASM1812 (beware PCIe Gen2)
PM8533
U.2 cards
x8 2-port (PLX PEX 8724)
x8 2-port (PLX PEX 8747)
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724, this is the card I have)
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724, another PCB design)
x16 4-port (PLX PEX 8747)
x16 8-port (PLX PEX 8749)
x16 8-port (PLX PEX 8748)
M.2 cards
x8 dual carrier (PLX PEX 8724)
x8 dual carrier (PLX PEX 8747)
x8 dual carrier (Asmedia ASM1812)
x16 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8747, low profile/double sided)
x8 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8725, full profile)
x16 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8747, full profile)
x16 quad carrier (PLX PEX 8748, full profile)
Oculink cards
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724 per @vintagehardware, reported working but some trouble with micron 9200 max)
x8 4-port (PLX PEX 8724)
SlimSAS (SFF-8654)
x16 4-port (Micro Chip PM8533, supports 8 SSDs)
These companies carry other stuff in their stores too that is pretty handy but not super relevant to above use case, but tangentially relevant (e.g. bifurcation-required carriers, non-bifurcation multi-oculink cards, non-bifurcation slimsas nvme cards, etc).
I'm not aware of any non-CDM companies selling cards with these PCIe switches on them, with the exception of the extremely overpriced $300+ Rocketraid quad-m.2 carriers (at that rate, just move up to HEDT). There are other far-inferior solutions such as the QNAP cards as well, but... there's really no reason to buy those when the above cards exist.
Happy to edit the post and add more information/other products/other companies if other members have input.
Specific to my card:
This shows up as a PCI-to-PCI Bridge in device manager on Windows 10 (PCI\VEN_10B5&DEV_8724). No special drivers were required.
I've attached a few pictures I took when testing it out on an Ubuntu test bench (Ivy Bridge), some pictures of how it shows up in Windows, and some benchmarks. Benchmarks were taken on the Ryzen 3900X system mentioned earlier.
Attachments
-
71.6 KB Views: 381
-
286.5 KB Views: 396
-
10.7 KB Views: 377
-
179.3 KB Views: 346
-
617.1 KB Views: 454
-
501.3 KB Views: 509
-
706.1 KB Views: 479
Last edited: