If it's cheap and built for servers, there's a very good chance this won't work in a desktop PC. Server PCIe multiplexers depend on a motherboard that actually support them. These kinds of cards have been around for years, and if they were actually any use to desktop PCs, they'd be selling like hotcakes due to miners.

the only thing new about this is pcie 4.0 nvme M.2 pcie adapter cards have been around as long as M.2 and before that they were sata/ssd

now that cheap nvme is at price parity with sata and hard drives are hardly worth the savings, I realized I might never buy anything but nvme drives going forward, only problem is most boards can barely fit 2 whereas sata is usually 4-6 this adapter thing might become quite common for gaming rigs, so instead of having a main drive at full speeds + secondary at half that + maaaaybe a third at x1 pcie, last 2 could share the second x4 port at least

schmidtbag:

If it's cheap and built for servers, there's a very good chance this won't work in a desktop PC. Server PCIe multiplexers depend on a motherboard that actually support them. These kinds of cards have been around for years, and if they were actually any use to desktop PCs, they'd be selling like hotcakes due to miners.

ASUS has been selling versions of these for PCs for years, this would probably work fine provided the BIOS has the option for the older ones; ASRock and Gigabyte have versions as well. These are actually pretty simple beasts electrically, they just re-route the actual lines from the slot to the m.2 sockets. The issue is that you need a real x16 slot to use one, and unless you have an HEDT system the only one you have is likely filled with a graphics card. ASUS actually had a BIOS option that would let you slot one in an x8 slot back when they first started selling them, but of course you could only use two of the 4 m.2 sockets as a result; not sure if they still have that option though. What really needs to happen is someone make a PCIe 4.0 x8 card that allows you to use 4 PCIe 3.0 SSDs, but nothing has materialized yet.

EspHack:

now that cheap nvme is at price parity with sata and hard drives are hardly worth the savings, I realized I might never buy anything but nvme drives going forward, only problem is most boards can barely fit 2 whereas sata is usually 4-6 this adapter thing might become quite common for gaming rigs, so instead of having a main drive at full speeds + secondary at half that + maaaaybe a third at x1 pcie, last 2 could share the second x4 port at least

Still not cheap enough Sata SSD and NVME SSD are about the same price NVME being slightly more expensive prices on BOTH still need to drop alot more

tsunami231:

Still not cheap enough Sata SSD and NVME SSD are about the same price NVME being slightly more expensive prices on BOTH still need to drop alot more

I recently got a weird 960gb 22110 ssd for $69, it maxes out my x4 2.0 slot so thats over 3 times faster than 1tb sata costing ~$90usd, laptops helped a lot in driving prices down, but they only help up to 1tb sizes, now my hope is on new consoles to bring 2tb+ down to reasonable prices soon enough all we need now is a bunch more call of duty games taking over 300gb to show up, if not, bundles like halo MCC might do the trick

EspHack:

I recently got a weird 960gb 22110 ssd for $69, it maxes out my x4 2.0 slot so thats over 3 times faster than 1tb sata costing ~$90usd, laptops helped a lot in driving prices down, but they only help up to 1tb sizes, now my hope is on new consoles to bring 2tb+ down to reasonable prices soon enough all we need now is a bunch more call of duty games taking over 300gb to show up, if not, bundles like halo MCC might do the trick

Speed isnt the issue the cost per gb for that speed is, I really hope the fact the console pushed NVME drives will drive prices down on ALL SSD/NVMe and other wise down to HDD prices, 70$ for 1gb on the low side of cost. There is litter chance of me spending 400$ for 2 TB of storage space special for those 4.0 drives. for console and wont happen on PC either not even 300$ Dont even get me start on the CoD crap 🙂