*Spits out coffee*

[Avacado]

So I decided to browse newegg for some PCI-e 2.0 M.2 drives for the X99 platform I picked up thinking they would be hella cheap. Nope, not at all. Everyone point and laugh at newegg! Seriously, how is this possible?

 

[damric]

vintage

[Sir Beregond]

9 minutes ago, Avacado said:

Everyone point and laugh at newegg!

OK

 

[pio]

Just buy an adapter, PCIe to M.2 is like $12.......

Edited March 30, 2023 by pioneerisloud

[Snakecharmed]

Those are all Newegg Marketplace sellers. Just like Amazon Marketplace sellers who sell new old stock, they all price gouge.

 

If you want older hardware at a reasonable price, you pretty much have to look on forums or go for used on eBay.

[UltraMega]

That doesn't even make sense, pci is backwards compatible. A PCIe3 drive would work on a PCIe2 board. 

 

Maybe they're so expensive because there is no reason to buy one so they overcharge for anyone who thinks they need PCIe2 for some reason. 

 

Why makes you think you couldn't use a regular m.2 drive on x99? 

 

The m.2 spec doesn't even include support for PCIe2 specifically, it started with pcie3, so these SSDs probably only exist for confused buyers to be price gouged. 

Edited March 30, 2023 by UltraMega

[Avacado]

11 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

Why makes you think you couldn't use a regular m.2 drive on x99? 

Nothing at all. I know that PCIe M.2 drives are all backwards compatible. I thought that perhaps because it was older that if there was any stock remaining, it would be even cheaper than 3.0 devices. 

[Avacado]

39 minutes ago, pioneerisloud said:

Just buy an adapter, PCIe to M.2 is like $12.......

The board has an M.2 slot. It was just about price and I was shocked at the differences. You can get a 1TB 3.0 device for <$50 now. 

[UltraMega]

1 minute ago, Avacado said:

Nothing at all. I know that PCIe M.2 drives are all backwards compatible. I thought that perhaps because it was older that if there was any stock remaining, it would be even cheaper than 3.0 devices. 

M.2 has only ever supported pcie3 and later, so pcie2 m.2 drives shouldn't even exist. 

[Avacado]

20 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

M.2 has only ever supported pcie3 and later, so pcie2 m.2 drives shouldn't even exist. 

I have no idea if you are right about that or not, all I know is there are M.2 drives out there spec'd as PCIe 2.0 and the EVGA X99 MOBO only supports an M.2 drive at gen 2 speeds (Shares bus with PE5), so . We learn something new everyday, I'm still reading up on X99, so it's all new to me too. 

 

https://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/151-HE-E999_Part1_v2.pdf

Edited March 30, 2023 by Avacado

[pio]

45 minutes ago, Avacado said:

The board has an M.2 slot. It was just about price and I was shocked at the differences. You can get a 1TB 3.0 device for <$50 now. 

Ahhh, now I understand the conundrum here.  Yeah, what you've discovered is correct.  PCIe 2.0 drives have gotten to be stupid expensive, even used.  There's absolutely no reason for it when (my above mentioned) adapters are like $12 and 1TB Gen 3 drives are like 50 bucks.  If you have an M.2 slot already, you already know the answer.

 

But yeah, it definitely sucks that PCIe 2.0 drives are so expensive.  They really shouldn't be.  It's the "retro tax", at its finest. -_-

[EHW Ai]

1 hour ago, Snakecharmed said:

Those are all Newegg Marketplace sellers. Just like Amazon Marketplace sellers who sell new old stock, they all price gouge.

 

That was also my immediate thought.

Edited March 30, 2023 by iamjanco

[UltraMega]

39 minutes ago, Avacado said:

I have no idea if you are right about that or not, all I know is there are M.2 drives out there spec'd as PCIe 2.0 and the EVGA X99 MOBO only supports an M.2 drive at gen 2 speeds (Shares bus with PE5), so . We learn something new everyday, I'm still reading up on X99, so it's all new to me too. 

 

https://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/151-HE-E999_Part1_v2.pdf

I was curious so I looked it up before my last comment. The spec for m.2 supports PCIe3 by default. That doesn't mean a board manufacturer has to give it enough lanes or the right storage controllers to operate at the full speed, and maybe for a time there were some m.2 drives that used pcie2 controllers to save money, but m.2 supports ACHI and NVME. NVME drives are the fast ones that we use today, but there were AHCI drives before that which were basically regular SATA drives in an m.2 form factor. Drives like that were common in laptops for a while, but rare in desktops. Dell used them to do some kind of fusion drive thing for a while and it was a really bad and short lived idea. Apple did something similar that was equally bad. 

 

There is basically no reason for PCIe2 drives to exist because if you wanted a cheaper slower m.2 drive, you would get an ACHI m.2 drive. 

 

X99 is probably one of the platforms that did not have NVME support at launch but did have ACHI support over m.2. A lot of these older boards got NVME support via BIOS updates. 

[UltraMega]

15 minutes ago, pioneerisloud said:

Ahhh, now I understand the conundrum here.  Yeah, what you've discovered is correct.  PCIe 2.0 drives have gotten to be stupid expensive, even used.  There's absolutely no reason for it when (my above mentioned) adapters are like $12 and 1TB Gen 3 drives are like 50 bucks.  If you have an M.2 slot already, you already know the answer.

 

But yeah, it definitely sucks that PCIe 2.0 drives are so expensive.  They really shouldn't be.  It's the "retro tax", at its finest. -_-

You would not need an adapter, it would be just like plugging a PCIe3 GPU into a PCIe2 motherboard. It would work, just have less available bandwidth. 

 

You're thinking of an m.2 to PCIe adapter for motherboards that don't have an m.2 slot, but Avacado already has an m.2 slot. 

[pio]

2 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

You would not need an adapter, it would be just like plugging a PCIe3 GPU into a PCIe2 motherboard. It would work, just have less available bandwidth. 

 

You're thinking of an m.2 to PCIe adapter for motherboards that don't have an m.2 slot, but Avacado already has an m.2 slot. 

I'm aware of that.  When I suggested the adapters yesterday, he was showing PCIe 2.0 NVME drives (non M.2).  So I naturally assumed his board did NOT have an M.2 slot.

[UltraMega]

1 minute ago, pioneerisloud said:

I'm aware of that.  When I suggested the adapters yesterday, he was showing PCIe 2.0 NVME drives (non M.2).  So I naturally assumed his board did NOT have an M.2 slot.

Ah, that makes sense.

 

In any case, I don't think the high price is as much a "retro tax" as it is a "buyer confusion tax" because as far as I know these should not exist and probably only exist for people who think they need one for some compatibility reason. 

[neurotix]

This is just ridiculous and probably the worst example of price gouging on Newegg I've ever seen.

 

Newegg hasn't been the same since they were bought by some Chinese company, gouging galore especially when GPU prices were higher and bitcoin was the reason (2019 or so)

[UltraMega]

Sorry to beat this topic into the ground but I found it interesting, so I looked further into it. Apparently PCIe2 m.2 drives could in theory max out around 2GB/s. I think the fastest ACHI m.2 SSDs I ever saw were around 1.6GB/s so I guess there was a small windows of performance advantage for PCIe 2.0 drives over ACHI drives. 

The m.2 spec also had a lot of variation before it was standardized into what it is now which definitely led to a lot of confusion for consumers. I still don't have a clear picture of its development, but I suspect the m.2 drive on your x99 board is the finalized spec but the board just didn't include PCIe3 support for the m.2 because no one was really using m.2 on desktops back then anyway so might as well save some money on the board.