PCIE M.2 card with bifurcation and pooling

[Svetgar]

Hey there. Looking for a card that can take like 4 m.2 ssd's and have them show to windows as one drive.

I.E., 2x 512gb and 1x 1tb will show as a single 2tb drive

Does this exist?

 

[mrpasc]

It does, Highpoint makes kind of such cards, but rather expensive. $400 and up. Not sure if they have a JBOD mode, with RAID 0 you would get only 1.5TB.
See https://www.highpoint-tech.com/nvme1/ssd7204

 

[Svetgar]

Awesome thanks so much!

JBOD... there's a term I haven't heard in a long, long time.

 

[nabsltd]

Hey there. Looking for a card that can take like 4 m.2 ssd's and have them show to windows as one drive.

I.E., 2x 512gb and 1x 1tb will show as a single 2tb drive

If you are using Windows, then any card that holds 4x M.2 drives and works in your motherboard will do the job.

Just use Disk Manager to put the drives into one volume. If the drives are different sizes, you can use "extend volume". If the drives are the same size, you can stripe them for more speed.

This is actually better than a proprietary board, since you could move the whole board to another Windows machine and read the data.

 

[Svetgar]

Thats a great solution. Yes I'm using Windows. The problem is the motherboard does not support bifurcation, hence needing the card to do it.

 

[SlowmoDK]

Thats a great solution. Yes I'm using Windows. The problem is the motherboard does not support bifurcation, hence needing the card to do it.

Then u still need a interface card with a PLX chip.

They exists but as mentioned are quite expensive, properly better to switch MB in that case

 

[mrpasc]

Caveat of those Windows internal solution: you can’t boot from. Works as data device only.

 

[nabsltd]

Thats a great solution. Yes I'm using Windows. The problem is the motherboard does not support bifurcation, hence needing the card to do it.

To get full bandwidth on the drives, you'll need a card with x16 lanes, plus the PEX chip. You'll also need to verify that the card can fit in your computer. The low-profile cards tend to be long or use both sides of the card, while high profile cards mean at least a 3U case.

There's a wide variety of choices for full bandwidth (e.g., https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256801702762036.html, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1SLF3SP/), and you can also go with an x8 card (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CVGZZCT/) if you don't think you will need the full bandwidth. Note that if you stripe the drives and use a PCIe 3.0 x8 card, you could get nearly 8GB/sec transfer speed.