Did you know they make pcie cards that hold NVMe drives? They are as cheap as $10 for x4 pcie lanes.
I didn't know that. I'm happy I found out. Huge speed boost for my desktop that only has SATA on the motherboard for far cheaper than the motherboard, CPU, and RAM upgrade route. That will probably keep this old desktop kicking for years.
Make sure your MoBo supports PCIe bifurcation. If not, the lanes only read the first slotted NVMe.
My mobo doesn't have any NVMe, which is why I was considering scrapping it. It does have lanes available for the pcie card and I bought a single drive card as I only need it for the OS on this machine. I'll live with spinning rust for the bulk storage, I want far too much space for my budget to put it all on flash.
I've been a drive speed junky since back when that meant WD Raptor 10k rpm sata drives. Very excited to get my desktop OS off of SATA.
I mean it's a BIOS specific feature. Those PCIe adaptors need bifurcation enabled in order to allow the x16 to be divided into 4, 4-lane PCIe NVMe slots. Without the Bifurcation option enabled in BIOS it will only show 1 NVMe storage device despite 4 being slotted.
I'm putting a single nvme drive on a pcie x4 card that has a single NVMe port and plugging it into an x4 slot, but that is a good point for others who may be copying me but with slightly different designs.
Ahh, I misunderstood. I have an older PC that I put a 16x PCIe NVMe 4 slot in, A 4x is a nice little expansion for an aux PCIe.
Curious to hear if you see any noticeable performance gainz. I never really noticed the difference between SATA and NVMe, myself. But to me, anything faster than spinning rust is basically "good enough" 😅
Like I said above, I'm a drive speed junky and have been for many years. There is definitely a difference, full chain sync on NVMe is about a day instead of about a week. I already use NVMe on my node and laptop but not my data server.
NVMe is 10x the speed of SATA on paper. Although, my new 14tb spinning rust is faster than my first SATA SSD was which is pleasant. Plenty fast for 4k streams.
Also worth noting that SATA and NVMe are currently the same $/tb. So only NVMe and spinning rust make sense unless you don't have an NVMe slot available.
My NAS is a little bit old, so no nvme for me. I just shoved an ancient SATA SSD in there a couple months back as a cache for all my spinning disks 😁.
Hoping the price of spinning NAS drives drop soon. I'm running out of space 😨
MDD sells refurbished drives for cheap on Amazon. The ones I got look brand new and pass extended SMART tests with flying colors. I just got a 14tb mirror for well less than a single 14tb new.
I've been trying to decide whether I want to go the second-hand route. It's *probably* fine, since the whole point of a multi-bay NAS is redundancy, but it still feels wrong
On paper, MDD has a 5yr warranty on many of their drives. That is far better than any new drives give you. Reviews say they have been great on DOA drives and other short life failures, so the only concern is really if they are around in 5 years.
