ICY DOCK Dual Bay 2X M.2 NVMe SSD to PCIe 4.0 x8 Removable Adapter Card for PCI Express Slot (PCIe Bifurcation Required) | ExpressSlot MB842MP-B

ICY Dock did a really nice job with this dock. It solves a big problem when building up server... what do you use for the boot disk(s)? If you are building a server, you probably want a mirrored boot drive. But you also don't want to waste two precious hard disk caddy slots on just little boot disks.So maybe you put an M.2 drive on your server motherboard as boot drive. Many boards only have one M.2 slot, so you can't mirror, and it is always going to be a big pain to get to that M.2 drive when you are done with the build... Even if you motherboard (many from Supermicro have sockets for dual M.2 drives) you still will find it a pain to replace one in case of failure.This dock/board solves ALL of that. It fits a short (half-length) slot, and still takes even 110mm length enterprise class M.2 drives. And once installed, you can easily reach back and pop out one of the drives in case you need to replace the M.2. It really is well thought out for this application.It also fits shorter M.2 using a sliding clip which is so, so much better than hoping you don't drop the tiny screw other adapters use...Your motherboard WILL need to set bifurcation 4x4 on whatever slot you plug it into. If you don't, you will only see one of the two M.2 drives.It has been in use now with no problems for a month.

I bought this specifically to add nvme storage to a NAS. This NAS only has half height slots, after reading reviews and checking the website it confirmed a half height bracket was included. Opening the package to install the half height bracket was NOT included and now I have no use for this. Even the manual says it’s in the package contents smh

Not refined! One of my sleds caught something on the inside and got stuck. I had to force it out causing the end of the sled to bend (see picture). It does not slide smoothly. I purchased two of these and they are both a bit rough.

Was looking for device to allow Dell R730 to boot proxmox from an nVME drive. This did the trick. May seem a little spendy, but if you want a hot swappable, mirrored nVME drive, this does the trick. If a drive fails it can be accessed and replaced w/o interrupting operation.Your server environment should be secure because there is no locking mechanism to prevent someone from popping out the drives. Bought one, liked it so much I bought a second, to configure an identical server.

Manufacturer RMA was slow (over Christmas/new years) and replacement also did not boot on a PCIe 2 system bus. On a i9 ASUS ROG system on PCIe 3x16 system it boots and testing continues trying to get Bifurcation working.

So while this is SOOO close to being a perfect option for servers, it's missing the ability to mirror (RAID1) on the card itself...like a Dell BOSS card or similar. If they put a chip on there and had it automagically do RAID1 right out of the box, it would be a server-class offering. This would also allow the full bandwidth of a slot to the adapter and not require bifurcation. They'd have to create an interface for the card, but this would still be leaps and bounds better than how you'd have to create a software raid mirror in Windows.