Comment by gigel82
3 years ago
I have a growing stack of RAM chips but also M.2 SSDs and SATA SSDs of varying capacity as I retire and upgrade old machines. It feels so wasteful to not have anything to use them for.
I wouldn't take a precious M.2 SSD slot on my main machine for 5-year old 1Tb drive, but I'd love to chuck 8 or 10 of them in some enclosure and build a nice performant NAS out of them. Alas, no such thing exists (just now some ARM SBCs are getting M.2 support but only PCIe 3.0 x1).
> I wouldn't take a precious M.2 SSD slot on my main machine for 5-year old 1Tb drive, but I'd love to chuck 8 or 10 of them in some enclosure and build a nice performant NAS out of them. Alas, no such thing exists
NVMe M.2 drives can go into PCIe slots with an adapter.
If your motherboard supports bifurcation, you even put 4 x M.2 drives into a single x16 slot: https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-4x32Gbps-Individual-Indicator...
It wouldn't be difficult to find an older server motherboard with bifurcation support that could take 8 x M.2 drives with the right, cheap adapters. You'd have to read the manuals very carefully though.
The limit is the number of PCIe channels. ARM boards rarely have more than a couple lanes. You really need server-grade chips with a lot of I/O.
Or get one of the new cards with a PCIe Switch to connect 21 M.2 drives: https://www.apexstoragedesign.com/apexstoragex21