Quad M.2 NVMe Ports to PCIe 3.0 x16 Bifurcation Riser Controller - Support Non-Bifurcation Motherboard

I purchased two of these boards. Each board has the option for two M.2 drives. They provide amazing performance on my older i7 board which only has PCIe 2.0a support. My previous M.2 board did not have the onboard chip which is apparently a PCIe lane "switch" which basically allows more use of the slot bus. The M.2 cards I installed are PCIe 3.0 x4 cards so on my old card this would translate to PCIe 2.0 x4 since the motherboard did not support PCIe 3.0. Due to the fact that each PCIe 3.0 "lane" is twice the speed of a PCIe 2.0 lane I would not get half the performance. The onboard "switch" processor allows use of more lanes and allows near PCIe 3.0 performance. Keep in mind that having two M.2's on one card mean they still share the slot bandwidth.Windows does not support booting from software created striped volumes and the cards don't have a RAID chip on them to create hardware RAID. Actually, I wish this card did support hardware RAID such as striped volumes, it would be a great feature.What I did is purchase two cards and placed four M.2's on them. I placed my C drive on one (Windows). Then I placed a smaller cheaper M.2 on the second card as extra storage because due to the PCIe "lane switching" placing only one M.2 on the card will cause lockups and system freezes. In slot two on both cards I place high speed 1TB M.2's and created a striped volume. Placing them on separate cards allow them to utilize separate "switch" processors to ensure maximum performance. Then I reinstalled Windows and interrupted the installation to set the Users and Program folders to my striped volume. Then on my first login, I moved the page file to my striped volume. Now I have maximum performance out of my two M.2's with a total 2 TB on the striped volume.Thus far the setup works great HDD access is amazingly fast and probably faster than anything the creators of this motherboard expected. Also, I created a large 50-100 GB swap file because the drive is really fast so paging does not provide a noticeable slow down and effectively gives me all the memory space I need. I typically just leave everything open and running allowing me to quickly return to things.Overall, if you are looking for the maximum performance out of your PCIe 3.0 M.2's this is THE card for you.Pros:- On a PCIe 2.0 system this is likely the fastest way to add an M.2 HDD- Allows extreme performance even on a PCIe 3.0 slot.- PCIe lane Switch processor allows nearly full use of the slot- M.2 Cooling features like thermal pads heat spreader and fan.- Allows two (or more) M.2's in one slot (a lot of other cheaper cards have one M.2 one slot)Cons:- Does not have hardware RAID, I realize this may require a different processor, but it is a big feature.- Requires both M.2 slots to be populated due the PCIe lane switching.- While the SATA hard drive interface comes on the motherboard this requires the purchase of a 200 dollar card.

I bought this for a Mid-2012 Mac Pro which has 4 PCIe 2.0 ports, two of them 16x. This card works great in slot # 2, which is a single wide slot. Slot 1 in the Mac is double wide, but that's occupied by an AMD Radeon RX 580.Which means that this card blocks slot 3, only leaving one additional slow available. Also, the NVMe blades get very hot and after a bit, I noticed "artifacts" on the screen that weren't there before and didn't re-appear after the card was removed.Black Magic's SSD benchmark shows this card with 2 Samsung 2TB (4TB in total) achieve write speeds of up to 2450 MB/sec and read speeds of up to 2895 MB/sec, which is great for an old machine with PCIe 2.0. The card is, however, designed for PCIe 3.0 where it should be twice as fast and maybe not have the artifacts on the screen either.In real-life performance tests, the internal SATA-2 drives that have direct slots on the Mac's motherboard worked better and produced a more linear performance. I mostly use those drives for Virtual machines and where a VM would boot up in 20 seconds on the SATA-2 drives (in a 3-drive RAID0 configuration) it would boot up anywhere between 60 and 180 seconds on this controller. I do not blame the controller for this issue, it might very well be the older PCIe back plane combined with insufficient power. Unfortunately, I had to return the card and the blades.

This card may work well for some, but I did not find that to be the case. First off, the screws that hold the NVMe in place were difficult to work with; I purchased a less expensive alternative after returning this card and the screws to hold the NVMe are designed much better. Secondly, the card runs very hot even with the built in fan; a heat increase is to be expected, but again, with the alternative card I purchased, the machine runs cooler with a similar configuration. Third, I personally found the card to overpriced based on the overall quality. Card was returned for numerous reasons, the above are just a few main points.

This worked great for a few weeks but it always seemed like roulette on if all the NVMes would show up. One drive went offline while the server was on. This caused a checksum error, which ZFS found. Then upon boot up after replacing that NVMe (which I thought was dead), all the NVMes did not show up. If I was gaming and the data wasn't crucial, this would be fine. I need something reliable.Lastly, the build quality it subpar. If you tighten the screws for the heatsink, you will bent your NVMes and the PCIe board. This seems like an oversight. Basically you have to screw in one/two threads and then leave it janky/loose. Inserting the card into a PCIe slot is difficult without putting pressure on a heatsink because it runs the length of the card.This card allows for full PCIe 16x Gen3 bandwidth to your NVMes; especially if your motherboard does not support bifurcation.I ended up going with a QNAP QM2-4P-384. Sweet build quality, good design. Only draw back is half the bandwidth because it's an PCIe 8x card.

Works as intended, I setup the SSDs as a striped drive using the windows utility