On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 7:06 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I still wish it had more PCIe slots. I'm considering switching to a SAS > card and then with cables change that to SATA. I think I can get one > card and have most if not all of the drives the Fractal case will hold > hooked to it. > ... > Honestly, I wouldn't mind one m.2 for the OS. I could just as well use > a SATA SSD to do that tho.
First, I will point out that an M.2 gen5 (or even gen4) NVMe will perform VASTLY better than a SATA SSD. That 990 Evo (which isn't an enterprise drive) boasts 800k IOPS. The fastest SATA SSD I could find tops out at around 90k IOPS. There is simply no comparison between SATA and NVMe, though whether that IOPS performance matters to you is another matter. As far as IO goes, your motherboard has the following PCIe interfaces: 16x PCIe v4 2 4x PCIe v4 1 M.2 v5 2 M.2 v4 4x should be enough for an HBA if you're running hard drives, so with bifurcation, risers, and so on, you could get 9 HBAs into that system, with 8-16 SATA ports on each, and with hard drives I imagine they'd perform as good as hard drives possibly can. It would be a mess of adapters and cables, but you can certainly do it if you have the room in the case for that mess. Those 3 PCIe slots are all 16x physically, so you could easily get 3 HBAs into the system without even having to resort to risers. That's already 24-48 SATA ports. Sure, it isn't quite as convenient as the IO options of the past, but it isn't like you can't get PCIe in a system that has all those lanes. The motherboard has already switched most of the v5 down to v4 in exchange for more lanes, which honestly is a better option for you anyway as pretty much only gaming GPUs can use v5 effectively anyway. -- Rich
