Question M.2 NVME to PCIe riser cards - any reliability/performance difference between them?

[jrichrds]

I see M.2 NVME to PCIe riser cards on Amazon for as little as $8, or $9 with heatsink. Any reason to pay more for better reliability or performance? Or are they pretty much all the same?

 

[Arkaign]

All its really doing surprisingly, for the modern nVME type, is connecting either 2 or 4 lanes of the SSD to PCIe lanes, along with the requisite power and ground from the slot. In that respect, there is no real processing or point of major difference between them afaik. It does make me curious if there could be like a 16-pane 4-slot card for HEDT Xeons / Threadripper etc where you could load up 4 3200MB/sec nVME drives and raid them somehow for 12,800MB/sec 😅

One big caveat here is that it's easy to add these things even older systems if you're just using them for storage. However for making them bootable, it seems like roughly 2014-15 era is about as old a platform as you can reliably add a PCIe nVME drive as a bootable source. Because those cards don't carry their own firmware and controller, it's literally just passing signals along.

 

[LightningZ71]

The card you are asking for, a 4 slot NVME to x16 PCI slot adapter does exist, but it is entirely dependent on if the processor (if direct attached, PCH if not) and UEFI support proper slot bifurcation. On anything lower than a Threadripper or Zeon, that's VERY iffy. Then, there are the active cards that have a PLX on board that can do proper switching and present the cards as just an x16 device. Those tend to work on most anything, though, as you say, bootability is not certain on older platforms.

 

[Billy Tallis]

For single-drive adapters, the only functional differences are whether it comes with a heatsink, and whether the adapter feeds the drive the 3.3V power straight from the PCIe slot or if it instead has its own 12V to 3.3V regulator. The latter is theoretically more reliable, but I've only had trouble with the passive power delivery kind of adapter when plugging it into another riser for measuring power draw. In my experience, using the cheapest passive adapter with no added cooling, directly in a motherboard slot hasn't been a problem.

 

[samboy]

I ordered the cheapest PCI-e card from Hong Kong/eBay that I could find (it was under US$5) and it's been working like a charm in a 4790k setup.

I'd previously ordered a more expensive version with a large capacitor; where the theory was that this could mitigate against power failure (capacitor would provide power to flush any writes). Unfortunately this did not seem to play well when the PC hibernated........... morale of the story is that more expensive/more features doesn't necessarily mean better!

 

[jrichrds]

I ordered the cheapest PCI-e card from Hong Kong/eBay that I could find (it was under US$5) and it's been working like a charm in a 4790k setup.

I'd previously ordered a more expensive version with a large capacitor; where the theory was that this could mitigate against power failure (capacitor would provide power to flush any writes). Unfortunately this did not seem to play well when the PC hibernated........... morale of the story is that more expensive/more features doesn't necessarily mean better!

Are you able to boot off of your NVMe SSD with your 4790k setup? I have a Haswell setup too, and my assumption is I'll need to use some kind of bootloader off of a different drive to use the NVMe SSD as my OS drive.

 

[samboy]

Are you able to boot off of your NVMe SSD with your 4790k setup? I have a Haswell setup too, and my assumption is I'll need to use some kind of bootloader off of a different drive to use the NVMe SSD as my OS drive.

Yes - I checked that the BIOS supported nVME boot first. I'm using an Asus Sabertooth Z97 based MB

If you already have a Sata based SSD; I wouldn't get too excited about upgrading as the perceivable performance difference was very small. If you have expectations set on all the impressive sequential RW scores then be prepared for a huge disappointment. My understanding is that random RW performance/IOPs is much more important for your boot drive and nVME doesn't necessarily offer a huge leap on this front (with the caveat that many manufacturers do put their best stuff into nVME anyway) - it can be worse as well.

 

[jrichrds]

One big caveat here is that it's easy to add these things even older systems if you're just using them for storage. However for making them bootable, it seems like roughly 2014-15 era is about as old a platform as you can reliably add a PCIe nVME drive as a bootable source. Because those cards don't carry their own firmware and controller, it's literally just passing signals along.

Is there a way to determine whether an older PC will be able to support bootable PCIe nVME?

Yes - I checked that the BIOS supported nVME boot first. I'm using an Asus Sabertooth Z97 based MB

If you already have a Sata based SSD; I wouldn't get too excited about upgrading as the perceivable performance difference was very small. If you have expectations set on all the impressive sequential RW scores then be prepared for a huge disappointment. My understanding is that random RW performance/IOPs is much more important for your boot drive and nVME doesn't necessarily offer a huge leap on this front (with the caveat that many manufacturers do put their best stuff into nVME anyway) - it can be worse as well.

Bummer, that's what I had in mind, lol. On a 500GB Samsung 860 EVO 2.5" SATA currently, and was going to go to a 500GB PNY XLR8 NVMe (Phison E12). Doesn't sound like it's worth the bother modding the BIOS to make NVMe bootable (in the Haswell era, only Z97 based boards like yours are natively capable of that).

 

[Arkaign]

Yes - I checked that the BIOS supported nVME boot first. I'm using an Asus Sabertooth Z97 based MB

If you already have a Sata based SSD; I wouldn't get too excited about upgrading as the perceivable performance difference was very small. If you have expectations set on all the impressive sequential RW scores then be prepared for a huge disappointment. My understanding is that random RW performance/IOPs is much more important for your boot drive and nVME doesn't necessarily offer a huge leap on this front (with the caveat that many manufacturers do put their best stuff into nVME anyway) - it can be worse as well.

This can't really be stated enough, I even posted a thread about that very thing. Particularly with more complex games and compressed loading times, nVME is down to single digits percentages difference from SATA SSD, and in some cases is even slightly worse (I put this down to the better SATA SSD models having pretty robust processors to help with I/O, vs most nVME being much simpler in design and more reliant on the CPU via PCIe lanes to handle the I/O load more fully, or in the case of controllerless NAND SSDs, *FULLY* passing the buck so to speak over to your CPU).

They are convenient. For the better models, the performance is certainly better IF you can feed it enough to work from (this will get more relevant in an all-solid-state world in the future) efficiently.

Gamers probably make the least likely market to benefit from them though, as loading speed differences are basically indistinguishable.

Caveat here is that many desktop PCs are ideally suited to no more than one PCIe x4 SSD, as Intel s115x only has 16 PCIe lanes native to CPU access. If you have a pair or three PCIe SSDs, the performance potential when combined with a PCIe x16 GPU is marginalized somewhat, increasing bottlenecks and raising CPU I/O overhead. It's for reasons exactly like this that Zen platforms as well as Intel HEDT have many more PCIe lanes, which can make running multiple PCIe drives and 10Gbit Ethernet much more efficient.