About a year ago I built myself an all NVME Unraid NAS with a 12900k + z690i + a 7540 Highpoint Technologies AIB and am slowly filling that up with 8TB NVMe drives. It was a huge success. Low power. Small form factor. Lightning fast. It has been such a success that another family member is interested in following suit and has enlisted me for guidance. The problem here is that not everyone is willing to throw down a fortune to make this happen, and at the time there wasn't a great way to do this inexpensively as you basically needed an expensive AIB in order to keep the machine small. Intel had, and continues to have, terrible bifurcation support. AMD was better in that department, but if you had an iGPU, (a necessity if you are building ITX form factor) it tended to hog PCIe lanes and cause bifurcation problems too.

 

It seems in my cursory research that the ASUS x670e-i and b650e-i + 7000 series AMD chips may be an elegant solution to this. They seem to have 4x4x4x4 bifurcation support with the iGPU enabled. Can anyone confirm that I should be able to get 6 m.2 NVMe drives running on these motherboards without a problem before I invest. And, is there any reason why the x670e might be superior for this purpose than the b650e if I intend to use this as an Unraid NAS? Would the additional PCIe lanes be of some use down the line if these drives were eventually replaced with gen 5 drives? (I know one would be stuck at gen 4 speeds)

 

My thought is set up a machine with one of the ASUS Hyper m.2 cards and a few 1 or 2TB NMVE drives and then point the family member towards the Highpoint AIB and larger drives if they want to replace/expand their storage beyond 6 disks.

I have no practical knowledge about the new 7000 series, their boards and hyper m.2 cards, but I know the 3000 and 5000 series.

 

You need some video output and therefor you are likely to go for a "G" type processor, this frees up the valuable 1st slot for bifurbication.

But the drawback is that the processor himself reclaims 4 of these lanes for his internal graphics. So for hyper m2. only the drives 1, 3&4 are functional!

 

Maybe they have corrected this probiem in the new 7000 series, but I have no info about this, so be warned.

 

(my 5700G has 2 onboard NVMes and 3 ones on the hyper m.2 card)

 

 

Thanks for the info. A 5700g would be an extremely simple update to an existing PC for me. So, it's a consideration. And, I'm glad to hear that the processor can support 3 additional drives instead of the 1 that the hyper m.2 compatibility list claims. I suspected that was incorrect with the way the bifurcation works. But, I'm glad to hear confirmation.

 

The downside with that solution is that enabling the igpu on a 5700g not only uses 4 lanes, it also locks the remaining lanes into PCIe 3.0 speeds. And, I really like elegant future proofed solutions. And, that is a bit of a slap in the face to say... not only are we not future proofed, we aren't even present proofed.

 

From what I understand, every 7000 series processor comes with an igpu so there is no longer a need for a G series. And, with the addition of PCIe 5.0, it seems that there are now plenty of additional lanes for the integrated graphics without interfering with the x16 slot.

Edited December 7, 20223 yr by Jlarimore

8 hours ago, Jlarimore said:

not only uses 4 lanes, it also locks the remaining lanes into PCIe 3.0 speeds

Never heard of this before?!!?!? and it also makes no sense. The first slot runs at 4.0 speed just with 12 but 16 lanes. And if I look at the temperatures of the NVMe, there are surely some with 4.0.

 

Also, the difference in speed between the 3.0 and 4.0 NVMes is not really practically visible. Usually the speed limit is the LAN, with 10Gbe you get your 1GB/s and thats it.

 

I would not waste so much money now for a 7000 system, prices have to come down to sane regions before (the boards, the ram and also the processors).

 

I don't know what usage you have for your NAS, but with a few dockers and one or two VMs even my 5700 is yawning all the time. And the 7000s are energy hungry, so it will be an much more expensive idle time.