ASRock offers HYPER QUAD M.2 CARD as PCIe 4.0 compatible M.2 expansion card

#5750257 Posted on: 01/13/2020 02:16 PM

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IMO solid construction. Additional 6 pin power connector and fan to cool drives which can sometimes be too hot.

#5750270 Posted on: 01/13/2020 02:58 PM

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I have an interest in these PCIe bifurcators, but, they're so weirdly expensive.

#5750343 Posted on: 01/13/2020 06:30 PM

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I feel like the fan is novel at best.

I'm no expect in thermodynamics, but if the shroud is acting like a heatsink, the fan isn't going to do much because there isn't much variable surface area to cool, especially underneath the shroud.

I also can't imagine the shroud being all the high quality either--just a sheet of cheap, junk aluminum that's not even making direct contact with the thermal pads (the white material probably an electric insulator.) And then how much power does four m.2 drives really pull? Let's say hypthetically 10watts per drive--which is on the extreme end of the spectrum since high performance drives look to only pull 6 watts, you still have about 35 watts to play with from the possible 75 watts from the pcie lane. And these are PCIe 4.0 lanes, so I can't imagine have power issues, so why the need for external power?

Like, I get it, and I understand why people would buy this, but I feel like the overall design is underwhelming.

And if I'm grossly wrong about the power draw, please tell me. I honestly don't know how much PCIe 4.0 drives draw. For all I know, it might be astronomical compared to older SSD's.

#5750356 Posted on: 01/13/2020 06:56 PM

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I feel like the fan is novel at best.

I'm no expect in thermodynamics, but if the shroud is acting like a heatsink, the fan isn't going to do much because there isn't much variable surface area to cool, especially underneath the shroud.

I also can't imagine the shroud being all the high quality either--just a sheet of cheap, junk aluminum that's not even making direct contact with the thermal pads (the white material probably an electric insulator.) And then how much power does four m.2 drives really pull? Let's say hypthetically 10watts per drive--which is on the extreme end of the spectrum since high performance drives look to only pull 6 watts, you still have about 35 watts to play with from the possible 75 watts from the pcie lane. And these are PCIe 4.0 lanes, so I can't imagine have power issues, so why the need for external power?

Like, I get it, and I understand why people would buy this, but I feel like the overall design is underwhelming.

And if I'm grossly wrong about the power draw, please tell me. I honestly don't know how much PCIe 4.0 drives draw. For all I know, it might be astronomical compared to older SSD's.
You are correct on numbers. This thing is overengineered and that's not a bad thing. Yes, m.2 ssds consume 4-7W, so even if we exaggerate and say each drive takes up to 10W and this adapter card is fully filled with drives: 4x10W=40W. PCI-Express 3.0 slot can deliver up to 75W.

The only real problem in all that is temperature. SSDs can be hot and when they are running too hot their performance slows down a lot, some manufacturers made mistakes by putting hot rgb on ssds which basically killed performance of these drives making them flawed by design. This adapter card requires proper design in terms of cooling. Included fan may actually be doing more than you think, if everything under this cover is ok.

#5750379 Posted on: 01/13/2020 08:15 PM

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Interesting, guessing the added speeds and possibly the controller would generate a bit more heat thus the additional cooling measures though from the discussion here it also sounds like there's some possible issues as well though I suppose a premium copper heatsink would take a fair bit of space although something like a PCI-E card even single slot might be able to manage if the contact surface and thermal material and coverage is good for the actual controller and memory chips into the heatsink.

Guess a fan could be helpful too short of having some side mounted case fan handling airflow though it might require additional power connectivity in turn although if the power consumption of the drive is that low the PCI-E itself might have enough to spare in terms of energy delivery for driving a smaller fan. (It might also generate a bit of extra noise.)

Suppose it's that or bigger metal blocks like what Corsair had for their MP600 however good it actually is short of looking like a LEGO piece from a slimmer stick to a bulkier block.
(Will have to look up results on it.)

Reviews would also slowly showcase how these newer PCI Express 4.0 devices are doing compared to PCI Express 3.0 in terms of thermals in addition to the overall performance advantage afforded so maybe heatsinks or some form of dissipation will be required for SSD's if the generated heat is increased even more. (Especially to avoid throttling which would negate the performance benefits if it would heat up to whatever the limit is on current SSD hardware.)


EDIT: Certainly seems to help, from a few articles some of these do get close to 60 Celsius so sustained workloads with less ideal cooling might hit the temperature limits fairly quickly without at least some heatsink or similar.
(Good to know just how much heat these devices can generate actually, was expecting it to be in the 50's at most but it looks like it goes higher than that.)

#5750464 Posted on: 01/14/2020 02:45 AM

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6pin power connector seems redundant. Even with the newest craziest m.2 drives that arent even released (samsung 980 pro) pulling less than 10 watts each and a 2 watt fan, you can safely pull all that juice from the pci-e socket. Hope you can run this without the power connector. Absolutely not necessary.