Yeah it looks like it just has redrivers and not a PCI-e switch so you need to have PCI-e bifurcation support you have to have as many lanes in the slot as you want to pass to the drives.
The target market for this is HEDT which has a lot of lanes to spare. Since the only upcoming HEDT platform with PCIe 4.0 support is Threadripper that's the CPU and platform it can only be paired with at the rated speed. Cascade Lake-X, which will be targeted against the upcoming TR, still has support only for PCIe 3.0, so it cannot be used.
If Cascade Lake-X's successor is Cooper Lake-X (as is listed by wikichip, though they might be wrong) it the same will apply to it (only PCIe 3.0). If it's replaced by Ice Lake-X Intel will finally be able to make use of this adapter card and the multitude of PCIe 4.0 SSDs that will be on the market by then (then = Q3 to Q4 2020 assuming no delays).
It can be used with Cascade Lake-X but at only half the speed of the next gen Threadripper if this SSD can hit peak theoretical speeds. That is the fine print in that 15 GB/s is drive is rated for actually falls into the bandwidth permitted by a 16x PCie 3.0 link. Threadripper will still be faster but the difference isn't going to be double but more likely in the neighborhood of 20 to 25%.
By 2020 when Ice Lake-SP arrives and presumably Ice Lake-X, I would indeed expect far superior PCIe SSD controllers for add-in cards. The current crop of multiple M.2 carriers will make way for true PCie 4.0 add-in cards for the data center that'll approach 16x PCie 4.0 peak theoretical bandwidth. This isn't terribly difficult as the number of channels for NAND can just be scaled upward.
Enough people are buying desktop parts for stuff like this to be developed. Sales of HDET and gaming hardware is stronger then ever, its only offset by the collapse of office PC sales.
Mobile systems are too power and space limited for "faster storage subsystems" to be relevant to them. You can already push 3.5GB/s through NVMe over PCIe 3. Thunderbolt 3 enclosures already edxist for rapid storage transfers on a mobile platform.
I think the primary purpose of reaching upward in the performance stack this high is to raise margins to make up for the loss of sales volume. LED lighting, mechanical keyboards, premium mice, audiophile headsets for PC gamers. Those are all indicators that sales numbers losses are forcing edge parts into the industry which is thereby shouldering out cost sensitive buyers and helping deflate sales. As numbers tilt onto cheaper budget systems or mobile phones, that's where software development will land, making high end systems for gaming at least, progressively less relevant. We're in a feedback loop as the market segment suffers from declines.
It doesn't take a lot of effort to build net worth. I get that it seems exceptionally difficult, but even as a single income, single parent with two kids, it took 2.5 years to add $100k in net worth (which happens to have happened with today's paycheck and 2.5 years after divorce) and I've never been in debt, not even for a mortgage and my deadbeat ex doesn't pay child support. *shrug* Pick how you live, but don't get too upset at people that put a priority on paying their future self over paying others. I want to put my feet up and relax someday (normal retirement age as opposed to some FIRE kind of early out thing) and being a cheapskate is part of goal attainment. Despite cutting corners, I still have everything I need and most of what I want.
If part of your saving plan is buying the cheapest possible tech and using it until is fails, more (or should I say less) power to you; but as long as your tech spending is adjusted that way, virtually nothing this site reviews will be relevant to you and your "I'm cheap, I don't care" comments on almost every article about performance hardware don't add any value.
I do however feel compelled to rebut your implication that anything other than bottom end tech is incompatible with good financial health. I'm on track to be able to retire in my mid/late 50's while being able to match my current gross income from savings (and several years earlier if only looking at the part I see). While I could squeeze a few thousand/year more out of my budget I'd be cutting into comfort areas to do so; and computer gaming is my primary recreational activity so a relatively high end system is an expense I'm quite comfortable with. (which is not whatever this ends up costing, despite the Aorus branding it's clearly a workstation product.)
There's nothing stopping you from spending on what you want. My comment, the one that drew your ire, was that desktop sales have declined dramatically and parts like these aren't relevant to the mobile/portable transition the world is experiencing. You decision to interpret and draw the conclusion you have makes it pretty clear you have sensitivities about your own spending habits on your hobby. It's cool, we all waste money of stuff. I feed the neighbor's cat premium cat food when it comes over to say hi because I want him to come over to say hi.
I will point out though, that a lot of my free time is spent playing computer games and I am not want for computer power. It's simply a matter of pairing up games with whatever hardware you happen to have as opposed to buying at the upper end of the price/performance curve. Cataclysm: DDA runs peachy on a single core Atom netbook and it's the kind of game that can eat your free time for lunch and then ask for dessert and a snack. The main dev stated that the ASCII curses version ran over SSH on a Lego EV3 brick which is like a 300Mhz 64MB RAM toy with adapted Debian included with Mindstorm sets. Gaming on a PC is about having fun and there's a whole spectrum of ways to get to that point. Doing it on the cheap is also one of many ways to trim the fat and if you dismiss that as only a few dollars here or there per year and don't bother socking for the future because of that in more than just gaming, well, yeah I can see why you'd want to go on the attack at a cheapskate like me and it's all good. I'm not bothered by it. If someone else reads this and thinks, "Hmm, if Peach can do it, maybe I can look at my future a little bit more and work that compound interest magic too."
Workloads with a dataset too large to fit into ram, either because you already maxed it out without being able to fit your entire working set in; or because a crazy fast/expensive drive is still cheaper than doubling the amount of ram again.
So stuff like giant rendering/cad/compute projects. Maybe some server roles, although raiding smaller drives on a backplane is probably a better option than a single expansion card for that role.
You are correct. This is a singe local solution, and a good one at that. for running the work loads this is intended for, although realistically 2x 2TB m.2 onboard would probably suffice for most. Expansion to an external flash array would give more iops if that is what's needed.
If you could fit your workload in 2TB onboard m.2, than this adapter would be perfect to offload to if you need to quickly work on something else. The adapter card could then offload to server storage and not effect your workload.
My hobby is stitching 100+ 47 megapixel 25MB .jpeg's into multi-gigabyte 100,000+ pixel wide panoramas. I could use this. I plan on building a new PCIe 4.0 system whenever it is that I can buy an HDMI 2.1 graphics card capable of driving an 8K display. I'm currently using a couple Corsair MP600's in RAID 0 on PCIe 3.0, which isn't horrible - I wonder if I picked up a couple more, if it would be safe to remove their heatsink in favour of the active cooling on this card, hmm...
"Fully populated with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the card is rated to provide up to a staggering 15 GB/s of throughput – at least, if you can come up with a workload that can saturate such a setup."
I'll believe it when I see it.
My current deployment of four Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB SATA 6 Gbps SSDs in RAID0, connected to a Broadcom/Avago/LSI MegaRAID 12 Gbps SAS HW RAID HBA can't do more than like 1.2 GB/s in actual practice right now. Theorectically, it should be capable of at least 3 GB/s.
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shabby - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
Can't the 16 pcie lanes be split 8x8? Or do the secondary slots on ryzen mobo's lack the physical connection? Are they only 4x?Alistair - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
You can split lanes often, but then you'd only be able to use 2 drives at a time in the adapter.extide - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
Well yeah but if you put this card in an 8x slot then only two of the SSD's would work.kpb321 - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
Yeah it looks like it just has redrivers and not a PCI-e switch so you need to have PCI-e bifurcation support you have to have as many lanes in the slot as you want to pass to the drives.TheITS - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
This product will probably make a lot more sense when the next generation of Threadripper lands.Santoval - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
The target market for this is HEDT which has a lot of lanes to spare. Since the only upcoming HEDT platform with PCIe 4.0 support is Threadripper that's the CPU and platform it can only be paired with at the rated speed. Cascade Lake-X, which will be targeted against the upcoming TR, still has support only for PCIe 3.0, so it cannot be used.If Cascade Lake-X's successor is Cooper Lake-X (as is listed by wikichip, though they might be wrong) it the same will apply to it (only PCIe 3.0). If it's replaced by Ice Lake-X Intel will finally be able to make use of this adapter card and the multitude of PCIe 4.0 SSDs that will be on the market by then (then = Q3 to Q4 2020 assuming no delays).
Kevin G - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
It can be used with Cascade Lake-X but at only half the speed of the next gen Threadripper if this SSD can hit peak theoretical speeds. That is the fine print in that 15 GB/s is drive is rated for actually falls into the bandwidth permitted by a 16x PCie 3.0 link. Threadripper will still be faster but the difference isn't going to be double but more likely in the neighborhood of 20 to 25%.By 2020 when Ice Lake-SP arrives and presumably Ice Lake-X, I would indeed expect far superior PCIe SSD controllers for add-in cards. The current crop of multiple M.2 carriers will make way for true PCie 4.0 add-in cards for the data center that'll approach 16x PCie 4.0 peak theoretical bandwidth. This isn't terribly difficult as the number of channels for NAND can just be scaled upward.
1_rick - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
"still has support only for PCIe 3.0, so it cannot be used."Wouldn't it just fall back to PCIe 3 speeds?
rahvin - Thursday, September 19, 2019 - link
It also works on Epyc if you want to use a server chip for desktop. And Epyc2 is already available.Jorsher - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
I want this for my upcoming Threadripper build... Wonder if there's a watercooling block for it?PeachNCream - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Sure I'd like a faster storage subsystem, but maybe one that's relevant to mobile systems. Not many people are still buying desktops these days.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Enough people are buying desktop parts for stuff like this to be developed. Sales of HDET and gaming hardware is stronger then ever, its only offset by the collapse of office PC sales.Mobile systems are too power and space limited for "faster storage subsystems" to be relevant to them. You can already push 3.5GB/s through NVMe over PCIe 3. Thunderbolt 3 enclosures already edxist for rapid storage transfers on a mobile platform.
PeachNCream - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
I think the primary purpose of reaching upward in the performance stack this high is to raise margins to make up for the loss of sales volume. LED lighting, mechanical keyboards, premium mice, audiophile headsets for PC gamers. Those are all indicators that sales numbers losses are forcing edge parts into the industry which is thereby shouldering out cost sensitive buyers and helping deflate sales. As numbers tilt onto cheaper budget systems or mobile phones, that's where software development will land, making high end systems for gaming at least, progressively less relevant. We're in a feedback loop as the market segment suffers from declines.SetiroN - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
What a stupid comment.DanNeely - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
And if it was an m.2 drive you'd whine that it was too expensive for your bottom barrel race to the bottom in poverty/extreme cheapskatedness system.PeachNCream - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
It doesn't take a lot of effort to build net worth. I get that it seems exceptionally difficult, but even as a single income, single parent with two kids, it took 2.5 years to add $100k in net worth (which happens to have happened with today's paycheck and 2.5 years after divorce) and I've never been in debt, not even for a mortgage and my deadbeat ex doesn't pay child support. *shrug* Pick how you live, but don't get too upset at people that put a priority on paying their future self over paying others. I want to put my feet up and relax someday (normal retirement age as opposed to some FIRE kind of early out thing) and being a cheapskate is part of goal attainment. Despite cutting corners, I still have everything I need and most of what I want.DanNeely - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
If part of your saving plan is buying the cheapest possible tech and using it until is fails, more (or should I say less) power to you; but as long as your tech spending is adjusted that way, virtually nothing this site reviews will be relevant to you and your "I'm cheap, I don't care" comments on almost every article about performance hardware don't add any value.I do however feel compelled to rebut your implication that anything other than bottom end tech is incompatible with good financial health. I'm on track to be able to retire in my mid/late 50's while being able to match my current gross income from savings (and several years earlier if only looking at the part I see). While I could squeeze a few thousand/year more out of my budget I'd be cutting into comfort areas to do so; and computer gaming is my primary recreational activity so a relatively high end system is an expense I'm quite comfortable with. (which is not whatever this ends up costing, despite the Aorus branding it's clearly a workstation product.)
PeachNCream - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
There's nothing stopping you from spending on what you want. My comment, the one that drew your ire, was that desktop sales have declined dramatically and parts like these aren't relevant to the mobile/portable transition the world is experiencing. You decision to interpret and draw the conclusion you have makes it pretty clear you have sensitivities about your own spending habits on your hobby. It's cool, we all waste money of stuff. I feed the neighbor's cat premium cat food when it comes over to say hi because I want him to come over to say hi.I will point out though, that a lot of my free time is spent playing computer games and I am not want for computer power. It's simply a matter of pairing up games with whatever hardware you happen to have as opposed to buying at the upper end of the price/performance curve. Cataclysm: DDA runs peachy on a single core Atom netbook and it's the kind of game that can eat your free time for lunch and then ask for dessert and a snack. The main dev stated that the ASCII curses version ran over SSH on a Lego EV3 brick which is like a 300Mhz 64MB RAM toy with adapted Debian included with Mindstorm sets. Gaming on a PC is about having fun and there's a whole spectrum of ways to get to that point. Doing it on the cheap is also one of many ways to trim the fat and if you dismiss that as only a few dollars here or there per year and don't bother socking for the future because of that in more than just gaming, well, yeah I can see why you'd want to go on the attack at a cheapskate like me and it's all good. I'm not bothered by it. If someone else reads this and thinks, "Hmm, if Peach can do it, maybe I can look at my future a little bit more and work that compound interest magic too."
Supercell99 - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Is your CPU going to process at 15GB/sec? I am not sure what the use case for this drive isDanNeely - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
Workloads with a dataset too large to fit into ram, either because you already maxed it out without being able to fit your entire working set in; or because a crazy fast/expensive drive is still cheaper than doubling the amount of ram again.So stuff like giant rendering/cad/compute projects. Maybe some server roles, although raiding smaller drives on a backplane is probably a better option than a single expansion card for that role.
Dug - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
You are correct. This is a singe local solution, and a good one at that. for running the work loads this is intended for, although realistically 2x 2TB m.2 onboard would probably suffice for most. Expansion to an external flash array would give more iops if that is what's needed.If you could fit your workload in 2TB onboard m.2, than this adapter would be perfect to offload to if you need to quickly work on something else. The adapter card could then offload to server storage and not effect your workload.
hubick - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
My hobby is stitching 100+ 47 megapixel 25MB .jpeg's into multi-gigabyte 100,000+ pixel wide panoramas. I could use this. I plan on building a new PCIe 4.0 system whenever it is that I can buy an HDMI 2.1 graphics card capable of driving an 8K display. I'm currently using a couple Corsair MP600's in RAID 0 on PCIe 3.0, which isn't horrible - I wonder if I picked up a couple more, if it would be safe to remove their heatsink in favour of the active cooling on this card, hmm...alpha754293 - Monday, September 23, 2019 - link
"Fully populated with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the card is rated to provide up to a staggering 15 GB/s of throughput – at least, if you can come up with a workload that can saturate such a setup."I'll believe it when I see it.
My current deployment of four Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB SATA 6 Gbps SSDs in RAID0, connected to a Broadcom/Avago/LSI MegaRAID 12 Gbps SAS HW RAID HBA can't do more than like 1.2 GB/s in actual practice right now. Theorectically, it should be capable of at least 3 GB/s.
Uzbkon - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link
Is it compatible with asus rog zenith II extreme?And does it need some extra adapter or something?