pcie x4 dual NVME drive card questions

I am looking at installing one of these cards to access two more NVME drives for my resolve work flow. Is it a simple plug the card into the board and everything should work as I needed as 2 separate drives?

 

Yeah, they make them. There's even some longer cards that will for 4-8 of them in a series but, very pricey. As long as it's not a Raid card it should show as 2 drives w/o any issue. You might not get the full throughput of them using anything less than the upper most 16X slot but, they should still be speedy enough in another slot.

https://highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/nvme-storage-solution.htm

I've had some good luck with other QNAP products for outside of the box applications and they hold up well for durability.

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/qm2-m.2ssd

Dual drives
QM2-2P-344 x4 slot
QM2-2P-384 x8 slot

Quad drives
QM2-4P-342 x4 slot
QM2-4P-384 x8 slot

These are all 3rd gen PCI slots giving the fastest throughput for the drives vs 2nd gen slots that will work / be cheaper

 

Thanks tech Junky. I have come to find out, NVME speeds are not necessary for what I am going to be doing in resolve. I am going to pop in my original plan of two Kingston A400s. I already have one from my dell notebook that developed a husky induced screen issue. Ha ha. So I only have to buy one more and I will have that part of my workstation complete.

 

Reusing things you have on hand is always cost effective.

I used to have a Kingston USB drive that worked well for quite a awhile and then started getting corrupt before failing completely. Such is the case with most things as they age so, if it's not relatively new it might be a good idea if the data is vital to pick up 2 new drives for longevity or put them into an enclosure using Raid1 to duplicate them in real time as a safeguard.

 

It's only for resolve work, everything gets stored on the HDD drives.

 

Two comments :

1. Your motherboard will need to support PCIe bifurcation for this type of NVMe expansion card to work. Your bios will have a setting for this if it supports it. Intel platforms can generally bifurcate an x16 slot to x8/x4/x4 when supported, while AMD platforms can usually go to x4/x4/x4/x4.

2. The Kingston A400 is M.2 SATA, not NVME. None of the NVMe bifurcating cards will work with this drive. The good news is you can instead get an M.2 SATA PCIe expansion card that will effectively add a new SATA controller and space for 2 or 4 M.2 SATA drives. These cards don't require any specific motherboard compatibility for bifurcation as long as you have an open slot and the necessary internal power cable available. However, SSDs can quickly exhaust available PCIe bandwidth if your card is being run through the chipset. I've used one of these cards from StarTech for years in one of my servers without any problems.

Edit: I may have misinterpreted your second comment about the A400. Either way, I'll leave my original comment incase someone else comes across this post with a similar question.

 

Yes, the a400 is not going to be used with the PCI interface. My workstation actually has 2 2.5 drive bay locations already wired up, just plug in and go. Now that I know that I don't have to have smokin fast drives for this purpose, I feel comfortable using them in my application.

P.S. Love the stig btw!