Sabrent 4-Drive NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter Card Review

[Mr. Fox]

 

Quote

The Sabrent 4-Drive NVMe SSD to PCIe 3.0 X4 card (EC-P3X4) is designed to add up to four NVMe SSDs to your computer with minimal fuss. Connect 4x SSDs into the PC-P3X4 and start using it.

The adapter fits M-Key 2280 SSDs and can be placed in x4/x8/x16 PCIe slots with forward and backward compatibility. This makes it ideal for adding storage to legacy machines. Your drives will stay cool, reliable, and safe thanks to the aluminum housing with built-in thermal padding. Enjoy NVMe levels of performance with support for a PCIe payload size of up to 512 bytes. Running software RAID/JBOD has never been easier.

Read the full review HERE

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[iamjanco]

@Mr. FoxGreat writeup, bud!

[Mr. Fox]

2 hours ago, iamjanco said:

@Mr. FoxGreat writeup, bud!

Thank you. It is a really excellent product. Probably among the most useful system add-ons that I have ever seen. I love it.

[keeph8n]

So Gen3 only? No gen4? Tried gen4 drives in this? How are speeds affected? 
 

Does giving the card more lanes offer any tangible benefits? 

[Mr. Fox]

13 minutes ago, keeph8n said:

So Gen3 only? No gen4? Tried gen4 drives in this? How are speeds affected? 
 

Does giving the card more lanes offer any tangible benefits? 

It is a Gen 3 card so I doubt installing Gen 4 drives would yield any gains. The PCI edge connector is X4. If you put it in an X8 slot I doubt it would run any faster but it would cut your graphics card bandwidth from x16 to X8 on most motherboards. It probably would not affect the GPU slot bandwidth on x299 because there are plenty of pcie lanes to go around.

[keeph8n]

2 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

It is a Gen 3 card so I doubt installing Gen 4 drives would yield any gains. The PCI edge connector is X4. If you put it in an X8 slot I doubt it would run any faster but it would cut your graphics card bandwidth from x16 to X8 on most motherboards. It probably would not affect the GPU slot bandwidth on x299 because there are plenty of pcie lanes to go around.

was not expecting gains from gen4 in gen3 carrier, but moreso how much speed would be lost.

 

Seems nice for those who need extra storage on mainstream boards or older boards. Unfortunately not a product I could use. 

 

Awesome review though. Thoroughly enjoyed it

[Mr. Fox]

1 hour ago, keeph8n said:

was not expecting gains from gen4 in gen3 carrier, but moreso how much speed would be lost.

 

Seems nice for those who need extra storage on mainstream boards or older boards. Unfortunately not a product I could use. 

 

Awesome review though. Thoroughly enjoyed it

Thank you for the compliment. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

 

For anyone that wants to replace SATA with NVMe I think it's a truly killer option. I had a couple of people remark to me that it's too slow but if your extended storage options without it are limited to SATA then there's really no downside. Massive upgrade from SATA. I'm now running eight NVMe and just one spinner HDD for file storage. I eliminated four SATA SSD by using this add-in card.

[Sir Beregond]

Great write up! I will definitely be looking into this when my daily rig needs more storage. Gen 3 speeds are fine for me for that.

 

I was really disappointed that the Asus Dark Hero board only came with 2 nvme slots. I'll have to double check my radiator clearance for the x4 slot though. 

Edited June 29, 2023 by Sir Beregond

[Fluxmaven]

Great review! 

 

4x NVMe plug and play with backwards compatibility without needing bifurcation is huge. 

 

The existing solutions in this space are either just a "dumb" card that is cheaper but just splits up an x16 slot. In addition to it using up said x16 slot, that also requires a motherboard that can do x4x4x4x4 which is mostly only in HEDT platforms.

 

Or they are fancy hardware NVMe RAID cards that cost several times more than this Sabrent.

 

This was a product I really could have used a couple years ago. At the time I settled for SATA drives, then ended up shelling out more for motherboards with multiple onboard M.2 and buying larger capacity drives once that was available.  

[Mr. Fox]

6 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

Great review! 

 

4x NVMe plug and play with backwards compatibility without needing bifurcation is huge. 

 

The existing solutions in this space are either just a "dumb" card that is cheaper but just splits up an x16 slot. In addition to it using up said x16 slot, that also requires a motherboard that can do x4x4x4x4 which is mostly only in HEDT platforms.

 

Or they are fancy hardware NVMe RAID cards that cost several times more than this Sabrent.

 

This was a product I really could have used a couple years ago. At the time I settled for SATA drives, then ended up shelling out more for motherboards with multiple onboard M.2 and buying larger capacity drives once that was available.  

Thank you. You're spot on in your assessment, too.

  

21 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Great write up! I will definitely be looking into this when my daily rig needs more storage. Gen 3 speeds are fine for me for that.

 

I was really disappointed that the Asus Dark Hero board only came with 2 nvme slots. I'll have to double check my radiator clearance for the x4 slot though. 

Thank you. Yes, I agree about that 2-NVMe limitation. Such a costly motherboard should have offered more... at least 4 (2 on the PCB plus DIMM.2 would have been nice).  I really like how M.2 (both SATA and NVMe) drives take up so little space and have no cables or wiring clutter to have to fuss with. Makes for a much nicer, cleaner build if you have enough slots. The added speed of NVMe is appreciated, but I think I appreciate the compact wire-free aspects of them even more than the speed.

 

Edited June 29, 2023 by Mr. Fox

[Barefooter]

Nice review!

 

Being Gen 3 shouldn't really make any difference as most people will use this to add massive amounts of M.2 storage.

 

I would love to put four 4 TB SSDs on that bad boy!

[Mr. Fox]

2 hours ago, Barefooter said:

Nice review!

 

Being Gen 3 shouldn't really make any difference as most people will use this to add massive amounts of M.2 storage.

 

I would love to put four 4 TB SSDs on that bad boy!

Thank you. Yes I agree with you that it won't matter to most people. And I would  also love to have four of those to put in it.

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by Mr. Fox

[bonami2]

Am i the only one that the 3 picture in the post don't show up?

[pio]

This was a review worth waiting for.  Absolutely fantastic work @Mr. Fox!  Definitely agree with the sentiments of everyone else here.  I'm using some of those "dumb" adapters myself right now in my rack server.  Something like this would be infinitely more useful had it been available at the time of my build.  Might consider actually buying one or two of these in the future as my server expands now though.

[Mr. Fox]

4 hours ago, bonami2 said:

Am i the only one that the 3 picture in the post don't show up?

There was a problem with that yesterday that I believe is resolved now. Nobody else has said anything but I was having the same issue. You might try dumping your browser cache and see if that helps. It's displaying correctly for me now. Hopefully if anyone else sees the same issue they will say something. Thank you for saying something.

2 hours ago, pioneerisloud said:

This was a review worth waiting for.  Absolutely fantastic work @Mr. Fox!  Definitely agree with the sentiments of everyone else here.  I'm using some of those "dumb" adapters myself right now in my rack server.  Something like this would be infinitely more useful had it been available at the time of my build.  Might consider actually buying one or two of these in the future as my server expands now though.

Thank you for the kind words brother.

[bonami2]

It seem to be working now. Il share this on social media in like 1/2 days if nothing wrong happen. Am at 14h on my shift live and no idea where my coworker is haha.