Review on 🔌 SI-PEX40142: 5-Slot M.2 B-Key SATA Base SSD Expansion Card with PCI-e 3.0 x2 Bandwidth, Requires x16 Slot by Hassan Tomlinson

I bought two of these boards. Two M.2 drives can be installed on each board. They offer amazing performance on my old i7 board which only supports PCIe 2.0a. My previous M.2 board didn't have an onboard chip that looks like a PCIe line "switch" that basically allows for more use of the slot bus. The M.2 cards I installed are PCIe 3.0 x4 cards, so on my old card it would mean PCIe 2.0 x4 since the motherboard doesn't support PCIe 3.0. Since each PCIe 3.0 "lane" is twice as fast as a PCIe 2.0 lane, I wouldn't get half the performance. The built-in "switching" processor enables more lanes and delivers performance close to PCIe 3.0. Keep in mind that two M.2 devices on the same card mean they are still using the slot's bandwidth. Windows does not support booting from software-created striped volumes, and the cards do not have a RAID chip to create a hardware RAID. Actually I would like this card to support hardware RAID like striped volumes, that would be a great feature. I bought two cards and installed four M.2s on them. I put my C drive on one (Windows). I then placed a cheaper, smaller M.2 on the second card for additional storage, as placing only one M.2 on the card would cause the system to hang and freeze due to PCIe "lane switching". . In the second slot of both cards, I put 1TB high-speed M.2 drives and create a striped volume. By placing them on separate boards, they can use separate switch processors for maximum performance. I then reinstalled Windows and canceled the install to install the Users and Programs folders on my striped volume. Then, when I first logged in, I moved the paging file to the striped volume. I now have the best performance from my two M.2s totaling 2TB on the striped volume. So far the installation works great. Hard drive access is amazingly fast and probably faster than what the designers of this motherboard expected. Also, I created a large swap file of 50-100GB as the drive is very fast so swapping doesn't cause any noticeable slowdown and actually gives me all the space I need. I usually just leave everything open and running, which allows me to get back into business quickly. All in all, if you're looking for maximum performance from your PCIe 3.0 M.2, this is the card for you. Pros: - On a PCIe 2.0 system, this is probably the fastest way to add an M.2 hard drive - delivers exceptional performance even in a PCIe 3.0 slot. - PCIe lane switch processor allows almost full slot utilization - M.2 cooling features like heatsinks and fans with thermal pads. - Allows use of two (or more) M.2s in one slot (many other cheaper cards have an M.2 slot) Cons: - No hardware RAID, I understand it might require a different processor, but that's it a big feature. - Requires both M.2 slots to be full due to PCIe lane switching. - Although the SATA hard drive interface is on the motherboard, it requires the purchase of a $200 card.