Motherboard with multiple M.2 slots?

P

ponky

Limp Gawd
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Nov 27, 2012
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Are there any? I'm most likely waiting for Skylake before ugprading, but just too curious and could not find any with more than one M.2 slot.
 
Not enough SATA ports or PCI-E lanes. Look very carefully into what gets disabled on a motherboard when using a PCI-E M.2 SSD.
 
The problem is the lack of bandwidth in DMI. DMI 2.0 is limited to 5 GT/s or whatever. Thats like 2 GBps for EVERYTHING all PCIe that are not part of your main 1/2/3 16x ones, SATA, M.2, and so on. Skylake only has DMI 3.0...one would have hoped like me that they would have at least doubled it right? Nope, its only 8 GT/s. So your stuck at like 3 GBps. You could get away with 2 M.2s but barely at that point.

Some ASRock boards have 2 M.2 slots. One is ultra and other is standard.

my board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157500

evilsofa said:
Not enough SATA ports or PCI-E lanes. Look very carefully into what gets disabled on a motherboard when using a PCI-E M.2 SSD.
Click to expand...
this. I have like 16 ports or something on that board but only 10-12 can actually work.

Either way the DMI 2.0 is a killer. You must get skylake if you want to push that to the limit or go haswell e
 
Ah, thanks for replies. For some reason I thought that each m.2 slot is an individual PCI-e lane, not combined with SATA ports. I'll probably go with two PCI-e NVMe SSDs and raid1 them.
 
Ah, thanks for replies. For some reason I thought that each m.2 slot is an individual PCI-e slot, like normal x4, x8, x16 slots, not combined with SATA ports. I'll probably go with two PCI-e NVMe SSDs and raid1 them.
 
You can get PCIe adapters for M.2 SSDs pretty cheap. Not that there are a lot of interesting M.2 drives right now except for the SM951..
 
Chris_Lonardo said:
You can get PCIe adapters for M.2 SSDs pretty cheap. Not that there are a lot of interesting M.2 drives right now except for the SM951..
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kingstons predator has low latency and consistent as can be. Its good if you are a heavy user and want consistent speed and snappiness.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
Skylake only has DMI 3.0...one would have hoped like me that they would have at least doubled it right? Nope, its only 8 GT/s. So your stuck at like 3 GBps
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It's easy to confuse the 5GT/s and 8GT/s specs. The 8GT/s is actually twice the data throughput as the 5GT/s due to the change from 8b/10b encoding (20% overhead) to 128b/130b encoding (1.5% overhead).
 
Groo21 said:
It's easy to confuse the 5GT/s and 8GT/s specs. The 8GT/s is actually twice the data throughput as the 5GT/s due to the change from 8b/10b encoding (20% overhead) to 128b/130b encoding (1.5% overhead).
Click to expand...

really its double? documentation? I never saw that anywhere.

Also the new msi z170 IIRC supports 2 m.2s and 2 SATAexpress. Additionally, it had an automated OC of a 6700K to 5GHz o_O. Check out the techpowerup.com review top left
 
I don't have the intel docs in front of me.

Legit Review mentions it here: 6700K Review.

Note that their math is wrong on the throughput. 4 x 5GT/s DMI 2.0 lanes gets you 16 GT/s of real data. 4 x 8 GT/s DMI 3.0 gets you 31.5 GT/s or so.

It more or less operates like the PCIe gen 2.0 vs PCIe gen 3.0 links. They just don't require themselves to meet the PCIe spec if for some reason they didn't.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157649

ASRock OC formula has 3 M.2 slots.
Click to expand...

From the manual:

* M2_1, SATA3_0, SATA3_1 and SATA_EXP0 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the others will be disabled.
* M2_2, SATA3_2, SATA3_3 and SATA_EXP1 share lanes. If either one of them is in us
e, the others will be disabled.
* M2_3, SATA3_4, SATA3_5 and SATA_EXP2 share lanes. If either one of them is in use
, the others will be disabled.
Click to expand...

Impressive that they don't share with any of the PCI-E slots, but there's a reason for that - the really fancy thing to do with that motherboard is seven Intel 750 PCI-E SSDs in RAID 0:

9Q58nRX.jpg
 
evilsofa said:
From the manual:



Impressive that they don't share with any of the PCI-E slots, but there's a reason for that - the really fancy thing to do with that motherboard is seven Intel 750 PCI-E SSDs in RAID 0
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better to use X99 because you have virtually no lanes to use on Z170. You would be better served that way.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
better to use X99 because you have virtually no lanes to use on Z170. You would be better served that way.
Click to expand...

A thousand times THIS. Everyone is hanging multiple M.2 slots off of the Z170 DMI. Even the expensive $400+ boards with PEX PCIe bridges will use them for "quad-SLI" and not bother branching 4 lanes off to an M.2. WTF?
 
izx said:
A thousand times THIS. Everyone is hanging multiple M.2 slots off of the Z170 DMI. Even the expensive $400+ boards with PEX PCIe bridges will use them for "quad-SLI" and not bother branching 4 lanes off to an M.2. WTF?
Click to expand...

yea that marketing picture made me laugh...its cool the option exists...someone may really need that extra single thread more than the lanes so at least the option is out there but main it is funny looking :D
 
evilsofa said:
From the manual:

Impressive that they don't share with any of the PCI-E slots, but there's a reason for that - the really fancy thing to do with that motherboard is seven Intel 750 PCI-E SSDs in RAID 0:
Click to expand...

LOL! Those CDM stats match with THREE Intel 750s in RAID 0. Just as well, because the CPU's 16 direct PCI-E are split 8/4/4 to the first three x16 slots, while the fourth x16 slot (at x4) and ALL of the M.2s/SATA/SATAExpress hang off of the DMI.

From the Tweaktown circuit analysis:

ASRock uses nine Texas Instruments HD3SS3415 which are PCI-E 3.0 quick switches; each can switch two lanes of PCI-E 3.0. Six are used to switch PCI-E lanes from the CPU to three PCI-E 16x slots. The remaining three are used to switch 2x PCI-E 3.0/ 2x SATA between each SATA Express port and each M.2 connector.

The only way you're getting 28 dedicated PCIe lanes for storage on a consumer platform is X99-5930/5960....
Click to expand...
 
izx said:
LOL! Those CDM stats match with THREE Intel 750s in RAID 0. Just as well, because the CPU's 16 direct PCI-E are split 8/4/4 to the first three x16 slots, while the fourth x16 slot (at x4) and ALL of the M.2s/SATA/SATAExpress hang off of the DMI.

From the Tweaktown circuit analysis:
Click to expand...

CDM doesn't work well with anything above SATA really. 950 PRO even reports weird because of CPU limitations. The program is coded like shit. Wish AS SSD worked for RAIDs
 
crashnburn said:
So does it make sense to buy an M.2 Mobo these days? For a simple home htpc/ hack box?
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If you're building a compact system, yes, especially if you're limited on drive space. If not, it doesn't make much sense to go out of your way to buy an M.2 board.
 
If you go PCI Express x4 in M.2 with NVMe and buy a larger-capacity drive, the performance is just insane. ars technica covers the Samsung 950 Pro PCIe, and the synthetic benchmark scores are jaw-dropping: 2592MB/s read and 1525MB/s write (about 5x the fastest SATA SSDs), and 353K Read/145K IOPS. Now, for most consumer use, will it matter if your game loads in 3 seconds rather than 4, or your Firefox tab opens 0.004ms faster, or Windows shaves 3% off a sub-ten-second boot time? Is that worth double the price for the same capacity? Well, that's between you and your credit card. Maybe throw those in a RAID setup, like above?
 
I see some benefits to the 950 PRO 512GB but it depends on the person. There are better upgrades but it helps in certain work loads. The read benefit will be Optane muahahhahahahahahahhahahaha
 
Msata?

The second M.2 I believe is actually PCIe Gen 2 x2 and not just sata. So it actually supports decent speeds. It sucks up the 2x PCIe off the PCH so it can use 1GBps IIRC Gen 2 correctly.
 
Interesting. Thing is I'd like M.2 as long as the price diff between a Mobo with / without is not huge. And I cant seem to find any super cheap Mini ITX MoBos on NewEgg - most start at 70$ approx.
And even new ones with M.2 are not that far away in terms of $$.

Unless of course someone can point me to a throw away price 25$ Mini ITX Mobo that I can get until I find a better item end of 2016/ early 17.
 
i honestly dont understand why people buy shit motherboards.....I mean if your making super cheap budget PC with a celeron sure but if your building a decent computer or a good one i can't fathom why people by crap MB. Quality ones are worth every penny in my book.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
i honestly dont understand why people buy shit motherboards.....I mean if your making super cheap budget PC with a celeron sure but if your building a decent computer or a good one i can't fathom why people by crap MB. Quality ones are worth every penny in my book.
Click to expand...
I agree. I will go for bottom feeder as a Temp, only if I know for sure that the NextGen is coming out in near future and thats where I want to build house.
 
Next gen is always around the corner. Wait if you can, just buy now if you cannot or don't want to wait. There's no point in delaying a purchase because the next thing is right around the corner. There's very little point in buying placeholders either.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
Msata?

The second M.2 I believe is actually PCIe Gen 2 x2 and not just sata. So it actually supports decent speeds. It sucks up the 2x PCIe off the PCH so it can use 1GBps IIRC Gen 2 correctly.
Click to expand...

That is good to know.. one day maybe I'll get to test that.

Also, I may have meant mPCIE... which is another connection I never use.
 
Tsumi said:
Next gen is always around the corner. Wait if you can, just buy now if you cannot or don't want to wait. There's no point in delaying a purchase because the next thing is right around the corner. There's very little point in buying placeholders either.
Click to expand...
there are notable times of upgrading..particularly die shrinks or major changes. I.E.

7970/680M
This next gen GPUs (14-16nm)
SB/IB/BW for mobile. Die shrinks are always golden upgrades for mobiles due to TDP limits.
SKL for desktops. You got true M.2, DDR4, Solid PCH BW, and more.
Kaby Lake-Optane, plus above,
Cannonlake will be gold for mobile

Notice many things are left out for clear reasons for them not being an ideal upgrade and most ideal upgrades assuming you like to keep a rig for 2-3 years is always around die shrinks. It is where you get the best bang for your buck and this particularly applies to mobile/low power playforms.

I really loathe this the next gen is always around the corner bullshit. There are clear periods where upgrading is ideal/big boost for your money. So please stop that bullshit statement.
 
Tsumi said:
Next gen is always around the corner. Wait if you can, just buy now if you cannot or don't want to wait. There's no point in delaying a purchase because the next thing is right around the corner. There's very little point in buying placeholders either.
Click to expand...

Yes, but if current mainline is at 75-100-125 USD these days and its missing some things that we expect to see in 6 months, I'll much rather pop in a throwaway 25$ Mobo if I can find one for time being.
And as the next gen rolls in 3/6 months, I INVEST into a Nice Mobo.. for long haul.
 
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