Review on 🔌 RIITOP NVMe Adapter with Heat Sink - M.2 PCIe SSD to PCI-e Converter Card | 2280/2260/2242/2230 [Upgraded] by Dee Rawls

Long term update: Some technical information ahead. Read on if you're interested, otherwise just take this as a 10/10 confirmation for both thermal management and moving NVMe to a straight-line PCIe CPU cluster, which in most cases will support I/O -Really reduced overhead. general usage criteria and circumstances. My personal unit has maintained a very aggressive usage cycle for my main engine for several years. My SSD temperatures stayed well below safe and cautionary thresholds (basically quasi-static maximum heat dissipation for my drive in a given environment) at 100% duty cycle and prolonged use. My personal device was used with WDB (<500GB) for a while, then shortly after with my current 1TB NVMe WDB, both with parallel access methods that push drive controllers to the max. As a full disclosure, my stated duty cycle and usage is a practical measure of real world usage. I stay away from intentional maximum heat dissipation features (think power viruses or some of Prime95's offensive "exploits" that stress a component far more than any possible real-world use case). Generally very happy with the results. Including a few technical details because I think it's totally appropriate. My components generate decent heat loss overall, although my overall build is surprisingly efficient. My hull configuration is about 8/10 for airflow, 10/10 for noise (where 0 is freight train and 10 is acceptable library); This is very important to mention when we talk about ambient air cooling, which itself is both a convection and radiant cooler (with most of the energy lost through convection, probably over 95%), and its efficiency is growing. directly affected by air mass temperature (while higher values of ∆t correlate with more efficient heat transfer, Thermodynamics 101). The drive in question is installed in the second straight CPU PCIe slot on my z390 board mounted upside down in a Corsair 600Q High Efficiency Positive Pressure Air Cooling case. Below the NVMe drive is my GPU, a single RTX 2080 Super that sits about 2 ½ inches from the drive. The RAM (2x32 DDR4) is air-cooled and light, a 9900k@5.05GHz processor with Corsair H150i Pro cooling (three fans). , radiator first with cold air intake for the underside of the case), which has an estimated overall dynamic temperature effect of 2-3°C at maximum loads, as well as 3x WD Blue 2.5" in raid5 (hard drive), 2x WD Black 2.5" in raid5 (drive) and 1x WD Blue SSD, all in a drive bay with its own air intake that opens into the housing. Still, the NVMe drive gets great cool airflow, especially when the power is on (there's a fan switching from eco/on accordingly). Chassis fans are controlled by a three-speed open-loop controller controlled by a chassis switch. Ok, first the facts. Marketing of this and similar products may be misleading. You don't get a 16-lane connection for your drive. First, the board doesn't connect the pins of the PCIe bus beyond the x4 specification. Don't even go anywhere on the board itself. The contact interface is only used to support and fix the actuator. I have no idea why the designer would actually define a mask to cover the board in these areas as they do absolutely nothing unless done with the simple intention of confusing the unknowing know-it-all masses. equipment specialists. Second, m.2 NVMe drives only come in a x4 configuration or less. THIS IS IN THE BEST PRODUCT OF THE GENERATION 3 x4. PERIOD. Well, if you have a reliable drive that you can use with both per-track bandwidth and NAND bandwidth, you'll be happy with this adapter. These adapter cards basically just connect the m.2 form factor NVMe drives directly to the PCIe bus, which is a much faster solution (on many if not most mobile devices) than using the m.2 chipset -buses. By using the chipset bus you "steal" the PCIe lanes from the SATA controller, or possibly the PCIe lanes. In the case of my z370 chipset, the manufacturer states that the m.2 port logic goes through the chipset (slow, requires more steps and interrupts), while of course the PCIe card slots (at least the 16x slots) are connected to the processor directly (absolutely the fastest way for the vast majority of modern architectures). This is a great and inexpensive small card adapter. Direct to PCIe is great, lowest possible relative latency, highest possible throughput/bandwidth and possibly even the highest possible power efficiency with clock gating enabled if supported. You want to throw the drive warranty in the trash. Most m.2 SSD labels are heavily impregnated with a metal or aluminum oxide/silicate/silicone compound that is highly thermally conductive as the manufacturer is aware of the frequent use/need for flushing of these drive form factors. Remember, since this is a data transmission device, all electrical energy is converted to thermal energy. In my case, my drive consumes 140 mW. While that's not a lot of power, converting it all to heat in a small mass like an m.2 NAND cluster would require a fairly efficient thermal solution. Using the included silicone thermal pads is imperative to ensure the longevity of the m.2 SSD, otherwise the device will be subjected to constant heat, potentially shrinking and slowing down if heat is not dissipated effectively. outside of the NAND block and cluster. I actually sandwiched my drive between two of the included spacers to direct some of the heat output back to the circuit board and the back of the build. Does nothing and blends well. I would advise to fix the screws and pay attention to the tightening torque. This is aluminum with fine threads, you can easily pull out threads at just a few pounds per inch. The source of all this horse hockey: EE and systems engineer. Some from textbook, some from experience, it's all wisdom to hold onto, IMO. Okay, all in all this is a great product if you have a Monster m.2 SSD. You can expect to see the highest speeds possible on your particular drive. I'm using a 1TB WD Black (current generation at the time of this review), I boot from it and get great speeds on both practical and synthetic tests. For the price I can't go wrong, the set is good. I have already professionally recommended this to a customer and will be installing it for them tomorrow evening in place of a SCSI cluster for a very specific type of database hosting. Make sure you also check your manufacturer information for your board and processor. Most CPUs will be fine, some boards or operating systems can get really pissed off with PCIe drives. it happened to me Also watch out for suspend/sleep states, which can also lead to hardware irritations. Conclusion: If you can run PCIe NVMe directly, you will most likely like this product. simultaneously. I have an external PCIe NVMe case that does the same thing. Kind of useless, discussed replacing them with orange SMD LEDs but didn't want to waste the effort.