Silverstone has released the ECM40, a PCIe 4.0 add-in card that supports up to four M.2 SSDs. The add-in card supports 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 M.2 SSD form factors and features active cooling.
The ECM40 is a single-slot card powered by a PCIe x16 interface. The x16 slot feeds four PCIe lanes to each of the four M.2 slots. Users who want to use this M.2 slot will need to ensure their host machine supports PCIe bifurcation, so the PCIe lanes can be split into 4 x 4 or 4 x 2 configurations.
To keep the drives cool, Silverstone employs a 40 x 40mm dual ball-bearing cooling fan that sits on the edge of the card, attached to a giant heatsink. The heatsink serves as both the cooler and cover for the card, featuring four thermal pads — one for each M.2 slot. The cooling fan can also been switched on and off manually with a switch on the PCIe bracket, allowing for passive operation when necessary.
The add-in card supports USAP and TRIM functionality, however Silverstone confirms that the card does not support hardware RAID functionality. The card measures 7.13 x 5.8 x 0.85 inches (181 x 147.74 x 21.59mm), which is around the size of budget-friendly graphics cards. The heatsink measures 6.61 x 4.3 x 0.56 inches (168 x 109.3 x 14.2mm).
Silverstone benchmarked the ECM40 with a Ryzen 9 5900X test bed featuring an ASRock X570 Pro4 motherboard, 8GB of DDR4-2133 memory, and a single Kingston Fury 2T SSD. The card was tested in CrystalDiskMark and showed a maximum read speed of 7,351.64 MB/s and a write speed of 6,845.57 MB/s.
The ECM40 provides users with a way to easily expand their PC's M.2 storage capacity with its four integrated M.2 slots. A card like this will most likely be advantageous in workstation systems or systems without a graphics card due to the card's PCIe lane requirements. However, the ECM40 can work with just one or two M.2 SSDs installed, which can make it functional in mainstream AM5 or LGA1700 systems that use a graphics card. Pricing and availability are unknown at this time.
