Icy Dock unveils 4-bay M.2 adapter for PCIe 5.0 SSDs: up to 56 GB/s
Plentiful ultra-fast storage for high-end applications
Icy Dock has introduced a new adapter that can house up to four M.2-2280 solid-state drives (SSDs) with a PCIe Gen5 x4 interface and run them in RAID mode. The card is designed primarily for those who need ultra-fast storage and run high-end desktop processors, such as AMD Ryzen Threadripper and Intel Xeon W.
Icy Dock’s ExpressSlot MB204MP-B adapter hosts four M.2-2280 (or smaller) SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface, but it requires PCIe bifurcation on the motherboard level as it does not have its own PCIe switch. On the one hand, this makes it relatively cheap, but on the other hand it needs an expensive platform, such as AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper and Intel’s Xeon W that can bifurcate a PCIe x16 slot onto four x4 ‘slots’ and support AMD RAID or Intel VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) technologies to enable multiple SSDs to work in various RAID modes (RAID 0/1/5/10 modes are supported).
With four high-end SSDs and via a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface, Icy Dock’s ExpressSlot MB204MP-B adapter can theoretically offer performance of up to 56 GB/s sequential read speed, though everything will depend on the actual drives used. For example, four drives each offering up to 10 GB/s sequential read/write speeds will be able to provide up to 40 GB/s aggregated read/write performance.
To ensure that power-hungry drives with a PCIe Gen5 x4 interface get enough power, Icy Dock’s ExpressSlot MB204MP-B adapter has a six-pin auxiliary PCIe power connector. And to ensure that drives to not overheat, the adapter installs SSDs into special removable trays with an integrated heatspreader. There is also a 50-mm blower fan to ensure decent cooling. The fan can be turned off to make the system quieter, though probably at the cost of performance under high loads. In addition, the adapter has individual drive status indicators.
Icy Dock has yet to disclose the pricing of its ExpressSlot MB204MP-B adapter, but keeping in mind that the unit does not carry any expensive PCIe switches, it should not be too expensive to produce and therefore should not be too costly . Still, this product is certainly not aimed at mainstream PCs, but at professional workstations.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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FoxtrotMichael-1 I use an Icy Dock SATA/SAS backplane in my NAS and have a ZFS array on a bunch of Samsung Evo SSDs. It’s an incredible solution and a very nice product. I’d prefer if the drives were accessible from outside the chassis, but given that m.2 nvme isn’t hot-swappable anyway, it’s not a huge loss.Reply -
toffty I love the idea and I really kind of want to buy.... but newegg has this at $500 US and that's quite a bit more than I'm willing to spend when all it's really doing is re-routing wires.Reply
This may also be an early scalper trying to make a quick buck https://www.newegg.com/p/35G-006J-00006 -
ClancyWiggum 4 way slot bifurcation is actually fairly common on consumer platforms, it's just that you lose your GPU slot in most cases (I've got a passive gen 4 bifurcation card I've used on Zen 3), and with so few PCIe lanes left there's not many use cases for that kind of speed with just a standard desktop CPU for compute.Reply -
8086 I wish MFGRs would go back to giving us plenty of PCI-e x16 slots at the expense of m.2 this way, users who want or need more m.2 can simply use a card like the icy dock or similar. And those of us who don't need more than 1 or 2 NVME drives can use the x16 slots for other things.Reply
A great mobo example of this is the MSI X570 Godlike vs The X670 Godlike. -
twotwotwo Niche, but you could do worse if you want to sling 16 TB of data to and fro in a hurry.Reply
I had thought this was the first of these cards with PCIe 5, but, huh, it turns out Asus has had one out for $80 for a while ("ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 Card"). Neat! -
thestryker Reply
*AMD, Intel doesn't do 4 way.ClancyWiggum said:4 way slot bifurcation is actually fairly common on consumer platforms
That might be a little high, but honestly their stuff is usually quite expensive. They have a 2 drive one (MB842MP-B) where the drives come out the PCIe bracket side and it was a fair bit over $200 when I'd looked. Everything I've used from Icy Dock has been good, but their really interesting stuff tends to carry a price premium.toffty said:I love the idea and I really kind of want to buy.... but newegg has this at $500 US and that's quite a bit more than I'm willing to spend when all it's really doing is re-routing wires.
This may also be an early scalper trying to make a quick buck https://www.newegg.com/p/35G-006J-00006 -
Logorithmic For the broadest adoption, the card needs hardware raid, and organic bifurcation. Something like the competitors:Apex Storage X16https://www.apexstoragedesign.com/apex-storage-x16-gen5Reply
Apex Storage X21
https://www.apexstoragedesign.com/apexstoragex21
Sonnet's M.2 8x4 Silent https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-8x4-pcie-card/overview.htmlHighPoint's 8x m.2 port SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16. https://www.highpoint-tech.com/product-page/ssd7540 combined with Sabrent's Rocket 5 (m.2 Gen5) https://sabrent.com/products/sb-rkt5-4tb
OWC Accelsior 8M2
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2