Berfs1wtf, 200$??? Hell no.

Berfs1wtf, 200$??? Hell no.

TheLostSwedePCIe bridge chips are costly.

Berfs1but 200$

Berfs1I understand that, but 200$ for a PCIe 3.0 x8 card that supports 2x gen 3 NVMes in RAID? If you SPECIFICALLY need RAID, an Asus Hyper m.2 gen 4 RAID card goes for 77$ on Amazon. If you don't need RAID but need bifurcation (for both drives to be detected individually), Supermicro sells the AOC-SLG3-2M2 for about 54$ on Amazon. This product is just not going to do well with today's hardware options. Sure it might make sense in very limited server environments, but then again, there are better priced options out there. Even for half height, there are better products that don't cost 200$ for an adapter. Hell, you could probably buy a half height x8 SSD (like the DC P3608) for the cost of that adapter plus your choice of SSDs. This kind of price just doesn't make sense in 2022.

W1zzardWhile I agree that it's way too expensive, neither of the options you listed come with a PCIe bridge chip

UskompufMany computers do not include slots to support installing M.2 SSDs directly

Berfs1If the target audience is server platforms

W1zzardThis seems targeted at consumers

Berfs1In THAT case, why would the PCIe bridge chip be of importance? A single gen 4 SSD isn't the way to go, because I know transfer speeds under high loads won't be faster than two gen 3 SSDs in RAID 0, but this has to be for the 1% of 1% of video editors that for some reason they are on a mainstream platform (example LGA1151) that doesn't support gen 4, but has an x8 slot if you cut off half the bandwidth for the single graphics card in their system, instead of an HEDT platform where an Asus Hyper m.2 would make more sense due to the x16 lane. Plus, most boards nowadays have multiple NVMe slots. I do video editing myself, I can't really imagine why this would be a necessary product for 200$, rather than choosing a different motherboard altogether that has the amount of NVMe slots you need. As a matter of fact, if they ARE editing 6K footage with this, they probably should be using multiple graphics cards or at the very least an RTX 3090/Ti (>20GB VRAM), at least according to Puget Systems' recommendations for 6K/8K editing. I don't want to get too off track, but at that point they probably have the budget to instead get two QSFP+ cards and just use another computer as a NAS, which is obviously way more expensive, but you could put an insane amount of NVMe storage in another computer, multiple arrays too if someone needed.

TheLostSwedeKeep in mind that Sonnet is a company that makes Apple accessories, so most people wouldn't buy their products, as they're overpriced in general.

AerpoweronYou can get a PCIe-bridge chip with 12 lanes.

www.asmedia.com.tw/product/507Yq4asXFzi9qt4/7c5YQ79xz8urEGr1

On Aliexpress there are cards with 2 NVME slots which use this chip. I payed around 80€ for it. But there are PCIe gen 2 and gen 3 versions. Gen2 uses the ASM1812 chip and the gen3 uses the ASM2812 chip.

There are also chips with more lanes from AsMedia, and they are quite decent.

www.techpowerup.com/245572/asmedia-readies-asm2824-pcie-switch-anticipating-a-rise-in-m-2-slots

TheLostSwedeThis kind of product requires 16 lanes though.

AerpoweronThe first one (ASM2812) has 12 lanes. So you can do 4 (to the mainboard) and 4 + 4 to 2 NVME SSDs

The card i have looks like this:



No idea why it has an 8x connector tho. All the lanes also go to the chip. If i could access the chip i could probably do something like PCIe 2.0 8x to the board and 2 PCIe 3.0 to each of the NVME SSDs