ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2 Supports 4 NVMe M.2 (2242/2260/2280/22110) Upto 128 Gbps for Intel VROC and AMD Ryzen Threadripper NVMe Raid

THIS.. is Asus Pcie expansion for M.2 and it was a great, convenient product from a brand you trust! This Pcie expansion card fits 4 M.2 cards HOWEVER!! It is at Pcie 3.0 and not 4 so please do not waste your money on newer M.2’s and just get the best value Pcie 3.0 M.2.This product is perfect for a pcie expansion! It comes with everything you will need INCLUDING the retaining screws. It is well built in a polished metal, easy to assemble and comes with thermal pads attached to the housing so it all runs cool.This expansion card gave me exactly what I needed and looks great in my system! With the ability to keep throwing M.2’s in my system I no longer have to worry about sata cables, opening up the back of my case and managing that demon. This has been a great product for my computer, and I am sure you will find this as another great asus product just like I have!

You need to enable "bifurcation" or x4x4x4x4 setting on the usb slot you're going to plug this into, and that setting is in the bios. Once you've done that, you can create a shared file system across the 4 nvme drives you've plugged in, or a software raid setup of some sort (I chose the former).The problems happen when you update the bios. This might happen months later, where you decide your machine's bios needs an update, and all your changes to the bios get wiped. Suddenly you try to boot your system and it can't find the drives. With Linux, this can cause the system to not boot, if you're auto-mounting the combined drive, because only one of the 4 nvme drives attached to the card, can be seen.Anyways, not totally for the inexperienced, definitely understand the limitations. Your system might not even support bifurcation, and you'll see a lot of complaints along those lines like ("can't see all 4 drives"). etc.Overall review of 5/5 because it does what it says, and does it without failure (maybe 3 months so far).

So, reading some of the other reviews, there are a few misconceptions going on hereWith VROC, we are talking hardware RAID; Intel software raid is a totally different beast. Called Intel RST, with completely different requirements.VROC Is configured in the BIOS; Intel RST is configured in a Windows App.ASUS support on this card is very good up to the point in the system where they are not in control. Intel on the other hand is horrible in terms of VROC support, and it took me a lot of digging to get things figured out.Intel has VERY specific requirements to get VROC to work; this has nothing to do with ASUS. Even using the same chipsets, the processor itself dictates which hardware key you need; desktop class vs. enterprise class kind of stuff. And Intel maintains a very specific list of M.2 SSD that are compatible with VROC (not just Intel drive, but still very specific).All that being said, ASUS hardware is great, and when you get it right VROC is amazing.I'm using an ASUS Prime x299 Edition 30 mobo (has 2 PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots), Intel Pro 7600p 1 TB M.2 drives and the VROCISSDMOD hardware key that is compatible to my i9-10940X.In the proper config, this let's me run a 2TB solid state, hardware RAID 10, that is connected straight to the CPU

I'm running this on an ASUS X370-F Gaming (AM4) with a Ryzen 3950X. I've currently got 2 Sabrent 4TB SSDs in it with full R/W speeds on Windows.If you're on an AM4 socket, you should only expect to get 2 SSDs working on it if you have a dedicated GPU. I've got a GPU taking up my first x16 slot and this card in my second. AM4 and X370 chipset doesn't provide enough lanes for a dedicated GPU and an x16 link to this card. B550 apparently has some extra lanes built into the chipset, so that *might* be an option for getting all 4 slots going once it's released.I did not need to install any drivers to get this working (though I did install some as part of troubleshooting.) Note that the four slots on the card are numbered, and on an x8 PCI-E slot, *only drives 1 and 2 will be enabled.* (Numbering starts at 1 in the top slot.)The card itself isn't recognized by Windows or the BIOS, so there's no easy way to tell whether or not the card is being detected if an SSD isn't showing up. To get it to work, in the BIOS I:- Enabled "Hyperkit Mode" in SATA device options- Set its PCI-E slot to run in "NVMe RAID" mode (despite not using RAID)- Disabled CSM completely in boot optionsAfter that my drives showed up in Windows as though the card wasn't there. Keep in mind that a BIOS update will probably reset all your settings so you'll need to re-apply them after updating.The fan on this this is noticeably loud. There is a switch on the PCI bracket for easily turning the fan on and off, which is MUCH appreciated. I've done some minor testing with my 2 drives in there and they only ever got up to ~55C with the fan off. I suspect it's unnecessary unless you've got 3+ drives installed and are hitting them all fairly regularly. The heatsink is super beefy.Documentation can be conflicting or outright missing, but if you're looking at something like this, you should expect to deal with those sorts of annoyances anyway. I can *tentatively* recommend this card if you have enough PCI-E lanes available to get the most out of it. Otherwise I'd recommend a cheaper dual-mount card, which should perform as well as this.