Surprised you missed the best use, m.2 to U.2/U.3 adapters. Enterprise NVME are sometimes cheap from ebay, and the drives basically have infinite write life for most people. Not to mention that they have so many more chips on them, that they don't get the transfer rate slow down you get with consumer nvme drives, once they run out of their small caches.
Anyone recommend a good brand adapter? I bought a M.2 to occulink to U.2 adapter on ebay, that was extremely unreliable. Great speeds, but would vanish until restart randomly. Would like to try again, if I could find a good one.
As an alternative to the ADT-Link PCIe extender, you might take a look at an M.2 Oculink adapter board and SFF-8611/8612 cabling to an external PCIe slot. Eta Prime made a video about this 3 months ago - he used a mini-PC with an existing external Oculink port connected to an eGPU, but he also displayed an adapter board that could be used in an internal M.2 NVMe slot. The parts came from Amazon. Oculink should provide superior signaling and durability over a PCIe ribbon cable.
I'm just going to sit and sulk in the corner with my MacMini, unable to play with any M.2 options, and yet I still plough through to the end of the video! I'm forever shouting our local gulls who make a hell of a racket. You're not in SW London near a bus depot, are you?! We may be sharing the same noisy brutes!
@@nascompares Ha! My sympathy dwindles a tad given that you’re coastal! Quite why we have “urban gulls” is beyond me. Between those and the flipping green parakeets here, there’s no chance of recording any clean audio!! 🙄
Surprisingly useful. Didn't think of the 6x SATA or AI being options. This suddenly gives something like MS-01 almost unlimited uses (with a different case, of course). But even the most ancient of boards could suddenly have a wildly different use. My old gigabyte router-on-a-stick is going to definitely see some hacking. Thx Robbie!
@@nascompares Think I'd rather the M.2 to x16 adapter and put a proper HBA in. Or maybe the HBA in the MB's slot and a 10gbe in the M.2. A little hesitant about a no-name adapter handling my data. 🤷
@@nascompares it appears my earlier q was eaten by a black hole... I went to the mfr website. I can't figure out how to buy it. None of the platforms it links to have that product available.
One more thing to use in M.2 is - NVME drive, but not the M.2. I found in "local" shops new (with original package and seals, have warranty) P4510 1Tb ( SSDPE2KX010T801 ) in U.2 form factor. For some reason they are twice cheaper than same/similar models with SATA interface while much faster. Aliexpress, 10$ M.2 to SFF-8643 card + SFF-8639 cable bundle and they can be installed in any motherboard with M.2!
The "crazy town banana pants" had me in stitches 🤣 Really good tips for the m.2 slot especially since boards are now coming out equipped with multiple slots now.
You shouldnt be buying those anyway. So much money for so few things...you can basically build a whole PC with case that supports lots of hard drives for a fraction of a price, especially if you have an old system already - just connect it with ethernet cable and set up file transfering, and you got perfectly fine, high capacity NAS, that can also do a whole bunch of things other then storing files.
it is far more caveated than simply bang in a device into the M.2 slot, by doing so you can slow down or even cripple the baandwidth on other devices as many M.2 are actually shared.
I've actually gotten into doing things like this for my daily driver PC to get around the fact that consumer motherboards these days have taken a hatchet to expansion slots in order to dump as many lanes as possible into more M.2 slots.
Those M.2 to SATA adapters normally use something like the ASM1166 or a JMB585 which can experience some weird behaviours (e.g. The ASM1166 needs a certain level of firmware for unraid)
That's a good point (and one that is featured in another review coming soon on the channel and SHOULD have been mentioned here, but the extent of the issue wasn't as clear to me when I recorded this. Cheers for sharing and updating mate
I've even used a small GPU on an M.2 to PCIe adapter (the stick type, not cabled) for video output while the main slots were taken by SSDs and 40/56 Gbps x8 networking.
Great video. I was all excited only to realise that my Sabertooth X79, I had already upgraded with Dual M.2 PCIe NVMe X4 Adapter and put in 2x 4TB SSD's :) So I can't upgrade further as yet. I tell you the Dual M.2 PCIe NVMe X4 Adapter made my 12 year old Sabertooth motherboard live longer and the drives are fast.
Ooooh, I thought I'd filled my bingo card there - I don't have an m.2 AI adapter or an m.2 to Dual SFP+ 10G, but I have all the others. The m.2 to PCIE x16 is probably the least useful, if you're into small formfactor rigs, but the 10G NIC, the 6xSATA and the wifi to dual SATA cards have been very useful. Though the wifi slots are becoming less useful, with most of the new ones being CNVio and not MiniPCIE.
If I remember correctly, M.2 is a fast enough interface that a fast enough storage device, such as an Optane module, could be configured to be effectively RAM.
All nice, but all my slots has been spent on NVMe disks. Just love the fact that I have 3 disks and no wires to hide! The only powercords I run other than the motherboard, is the GPU. Makes a much cleaner build with modular PSUs.
Great video. I've always been keen on finding alternate uses for hardware like this that the typical user wouldn't think of doing. Especially if you build custom rigs for example which use nonconventional designs/layouts/sizes.
Mind if I ask how I would identify such a slot, and how one converts this to PCI-E/NVMe please? I have a number of devices with unpopulated wifi slots (I'm all wired here) and being able to use those as PCI-E 1x/2x slots would come in damned handy! 👍
That mini SAS may seem useless but there are cables that can split that to 4 or maybe more SATA drives. You also can use SAS if you want where with SATA you can't. SATA drives work with SAS but SAS works with both SATA or SAS. So if you plan to use SATA drives SAS is OK for it with that cable.
The enhancements only work if its an NVME M.2 AND the use of the pcie lanes in the slot doesn't disable them elsewhere.... There are M2 nvme to multiple nvme breakouts.. cheap, one pcie lane each m2 slot. Or expensive.. pcie lane switch to provide more.
There are better things that you didn't mention. When you talked about the 2x10GbE, the device you showed was actually a re-manned SFP+ and the device to connect it was actually actually a mini-sas standard (I forget which one) but there are tons of SFF 8643 devices so if you want to go that rout use those. You have U.2 adapters and External versions for things like Jbod and backplains. Also Occulink really deserves a shout out here. Missed opportunity.
I like the concept of using Oculink like TB or Firewire for utilising PCI-E devices in external enclosures. Obviously this is its main use case for eGPUs, but I'm thinking low power devices like my 2-slot PCI-E 3.0 1X Audio card that I can't live without. M.2 - Oculink bridge could provide a neat interface that promotes portability for SFF systems.
This is great information. I had no idea this M.2 could do anything else but Wi-Fi. I can now use my very limited NUC i3 Intel with only 1 NIC with an extra 2.5 GB LAN as a OpnSense firewall, taking over my very poor current OpnSense firewall that can't load all the geo location database needed to stop the scam/spam and can't run the clamd antivirus plugin either due to the limitations of the resources on it. This is excellent news. Recycling older hardware to good use :)
Those wifi M.2 cards are often USB 2. Depending on the age of the host machine, USB 2 over M.2 might be all you get. iirc, more modern M.2 wifi cards can be USB 3 and/or PCIe x2? Some of your suggestions are going to need a larger case. I don't see a lot of point in ITX vs mATX if you're going to need more space.
@@landtimforgot Yes but the slot keying is different, you don't get USB interfaces with the common M keying used with SATA and PCIe interfaces of SSD storage. Just physically won't mate.
In my current system there are no M.2s but im building a new PC and i did not know that these slots can be used for anything else. Thats a lot of info, thanks
As a low-income hacker, I'd noticed that classic HDDs at a certain UK secondhand retailer seemed to be coming down in price quite a lot, and 05:00 finally explains for why. Looks like I'm going to have to remember to keep hold of those S-ATA I/F cards for the forseeable, especially as I imagine that there'll be no classic/magnetic devices built for the M.2 standard at all, which makes long-term data storage and archival a pig. 🐷 Going to have to dig out a pinout of the M.2 standard and learn a bit more about it. I thought it was just a storage interface, not a _complete_ PCI-Express 4x4 interface! 😳 And yes, I wish I could be this handsome too. If I was then I could also produce UA-cam content that people would actually watch, rather than my videos being shadowbanned and my comments being dropped left right and centre because platforms don't like those with diversity _and_ handicaps... 🌻🏳🌈😢
M2-to-SATA is not equal to normal SATA ports. For example, it does not let HDDs go to sleep mode (actually, they enter sleep mode and wake up immediately). I had to junk this card
It depends on the chip used. Even some cheap ones in USB enclosures spin down your drives! Asmedia ones let your CPU go to low energy states and sleep your drives. The fact is PCIe is PCIe and you can get the same chip on M2 you can get as PCIe card
@@leito1996 my nvme-to-sata is (said) based asm1166, which should be not bad, but still SATA disks are not span down. Sata disk is taken offline in Windows so nobody is accessing it , I put it to sleep via command like, then it stops, then it spins up right away
Nice! I have six Dell Wyse 5070’s and I was wondering how to turn one into a NAS. That SATA adapter (and probably using the WiFi slot) sounds like a real solution. Thanks for the tips
I was listening to you while working. My brain registered your accent but my attention was divided. So I was sitting here wondering what the heck an Aye Aye adaptor is. Does that let you connect a pirate ship to your M.2? Anyway, thanks for this little roundup, great video.
A year ago I bought one of those m.2 to 10gbe adapters for my system because I was out of PCIe slots. For reference, I was using a ryzen 5950x on an x570 chipset. My observations that you didn't have on your review that I feel are important and I'd love further investigation. First, the included thimble sized heat sink was not adequate as it would overheat and then I'd lose network connectivity. I had to replace it with something more robust. Seeing I was in it to win it, I used a thermalright fully active m.2 cooler. That solved the overheating. Second, because the device is a b+m key, I was only getting PCIe x2, NOT x4. It was easily verfied with a lspci -vv command and it always showed the device ws downgraded. Because of that, performance was nerfed and I coulnd't get 10gbe with iperf even when running parallels. My solution was then to use an m.2 to PCIe adapter like you had, then a 10gbe card (running the same aquantia chipset). Boom, iperf gave 9+.
The big problem that makes most of this pointless is that the M2 slots share the bus of PCIe slots, meaning that utilizing them prevents using the PCIe slots they are paired with. You have to pick one or the other, especially on enthusiast class boards.
Only problem I know of these little M.2 slots is that when you actually plugin a 10GB Network Card or a GPU.. it get hot as hell, burning hot. But I heared you can plug like over a 100 USB ports on them.. thats insane!
This got me thinking how many Floppy Drives I could add using one M.2 slot. Not for speed and definitely not for capacity but merely for nostalgic geek image.
I would pay good money to see you plug one of those m.2 to PCI-E adapters into one of the new Microsoft Surface units that has the m.2 upgrade slot. you would probably have to completely disassemble the tablet and alter the housing but it would be AWESOME! LOL. put a 4070 or something like that on it. lol. I know there would be a bottleneck from hell there but it would be hilarious and cool to see if the system could recognize it and utilize it!! Could you imagine being in a library gaming with a 4070 setting on the table 🤣🤣 That would be the best conversation starter.... EVER! lol Don't forget to take your power supply with you as well! LOL 🤣🤣 I just had an even better idea. Take some thick acrylic and make a box with ventilation and somehow fix the Surface in the front of it and put the graphics card and power supply in there! LOL. That would be awesome! you could make a portable DIY Surface gaming rig lol.
esentially m.2 is basically just a repackaged pcie, sata or usb connector or a mix of those for example wifi key m.2 often carry 2x pcie and 1 usb , nvme carries 4x pcie and so on and in many cases standards are interchangable i am using my dedicated x16 pcie port on my motherboard wrong because i put m.2 adapter into it just to have 2 nvme drives on my desktop computer full size graphic card would not fit into it anyway and on my laptop i desoldered sd card reader chip just to add m.2 socket on cables for another ssd support and dualboot a cheap hp laptop with no upgradable storage i am much more upset about x4 pcie slot not being popular on desktop boards because making ssd that slots into that would be much easier with much more space for radiators and no need for screws and other laptop things could also be plugged in there, but for some reason bubblegum slot is better form factor even on desktop where space is not a constrain making it worse and placing it often under gpu slot and making ssd's die from excesive heat
5:05 The idea of having a sweet server board with 2 built in miniSAS HD and then going with janky m2 to sata adapter seems quite wrong to me. Especially if you live in US you should have a wide variety of SAS breakout cables and SAS backplanes available, should just go with those IMHO. (Personally just got a 4 bay hotswap rack for my server with miniSAS HD but sadly i didn't notice that the cable is a separate purchase so still need to get one)
These options shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone, as they've been around for years with the previous Mini PCIe (mPCIe) form factor... of which M.2 PCIe (NVMe) is just a more modern version of.
Hey there. New to the channel. Very useful. YT algorithm sent me after searching for SATA slots. Littlehampton beach here, and can't tell my live seagulls from yours! 🙂
You are looking for pretty crazy custom boards there! The sorta thing that needs a special onboard controller. Not like the expander 4xm.2 card that the Lockerstor gen 2 and 3 use
I managed to double the speed of my M.2 NVME Gen4 SSD with one simple trick. Put in the Gen4 slot instead of the Gen3 one. I'm too ashamed to say how long it was in the wrong place.
This is great and all, but as I only have a laptop with one M.2 drive I will stick to using it as storage. Funny, you say wired is reliable, stable and consistent, but my EE Wi-Fi has been exactly that for 6 months. And, it is faster than my home broadband, which is why I ditched my home broadband for my phone hotspot internet. It's also a lot cheaper. Horses for courses I guess.
What about a video on what we can do with those pretty useless M.2 NGFF SATA 2042 ports they keep putting in the NUCs and its clones? Useless because actual SATA SSDs of that format are extremely expensive.
Oddly enough, when NVMe launched, it was far more expensive then NGFF drives, right up until everyone figured out how much better it is for storage, and the production volumes went up and the prices came down.
I'll save you 10min32sec : an M.2 slot is usally just another PCIE 3.0/4.0 1X/2X/4X, here you go (unless it's a specific old laptop wifi port which wouldn't have every pins necessary to be pcie port, but just MSATA or over things)
make sure to get NVME instead of SATA for M.2 slots if using an SSD,, they are almost as fast as the Ram... as for internet speeds, a lot of people don't realize it but 1mbps is more than fast enough for majority of uses... I only use 15mbps on my home internet with 1 other person using also... People are just shoving their money into ISP pockets and getting nothing in return...
You should put together a list with all your links in one place(just put a note that prices can change). I wanted to check some of the motherboards you where referencing, however you only listed links for the cards.
thare are still a lot of questions about smart ups systems budget and others, i follow some reddit threads and most people are still questioning what kind of ups they should get and if its able to connect (software) to their nas so it neatly turns it off on time. what are the best picks for late 2024, that works on ;asustor, Qnap and Sygnology?
Thanks for the information. My problem is that many of the products shown here are apparently not yet available for purchase. I would be particularly interested in the M.2 to SFP+ cards, then I would no longer have to take the detour via OCuLink. Even my Retro XP PC can access the 10G network via OCuLink. However, OCuLink has an advantage that should not be underestimated: The SFP+ card can be quickly moved from one PC to the next.
I have one PCIe NVMe M.2 connector for a SSD drive in my laptop and one in my mini PC and both have exactly what's supposed to be connected to them -- the C: drive (512 GB in the laptop, 2 TB in the mini PC).
4:36 Can we talk about how a guy that's only used to voice operated computers can suddenly type at 1000wpm? On a qwerty keyboard no less, because apparently humanity never moved up to dvorak.
I wish my board had more m.2 slots. I only it only has two. But I searched a while for an matx board with intel alterlake w680 chipset to have ecc support. Both slots are used for SSDs. One for Proxmox and the VMs and one for data that changes often or I want to be fast. Thankfully I have a PCIe x4 slot left for another card if I want to upgrade to 10g Ethernet.
Since I use my pc for gaming, I only need it for ssd. My media pc, again, I only need it for ssd. 😂 But all the other options are great for those that can use them.
Not sure what happened in your life that led you to 'go negative' bud, but hope you get better. It's a waste of a life to be negative for the sake of it.
Not to rain on the excellent parade of ideas, but people need to remember that the older or cheaper boards and mini pcs may only have PCIe 3.0 (~8 Gigabits/s per lane) or only a x1 slot, or both limits. All part of Intels goal to cripple the Atoms and J/N series cpus. "Oh you wanted more fast lanes, please buy a far more expensive cpu!" 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️. On the upside PCIe has its speed in both directions at once. 👍
This could turn a old PC into a relatively useful NAS - putting in a 10GB M.2 card and a router? Could a PCIe gen 5 M.2 Be converted to a PCIe gen 3 x 16 GPU slot effectively?
To say you're using it "wrong" is pretty clickbaity at best, as opposed to PCIe slot can be used for multiple types of devices. Bu that wouldn't get quite as many clicks.
It should be made more explicit that Coral is ONLY good for object recognition tasks, and thus only good for a security system. It is an incredibly weak NPU with a very small memory pool. No problem if you're just doing object recognition for a security camera or two, but it will never help you do any of the really popular and fun AI projects. Projects like image generation, large language models, STT, TTS to Voice, and RVT vocal encoders, it simply doesn't have the memory capacity or bandwidth for any of that.
Thanks for the new m.2 rabbit hole. No sunlight for me today.
🤣
It's highly overrated anyway. I hear it causes squinting and cancer neither of which I'm into.
@@doktormcnasty
Childhood exposure to sunlight helps the body and even the eyes grow properly. Irony about squinting
@@Un1234l Humor... Have you ever heard of it? Or you're the AI bot already? xD
@@gordonfreeman5648
It's called fun fact and trivia bud. Can still do that in response to jokes
You got me with that thumbnail... I was like... "why did he put on a suit???" Haha
I'll have you know I have 3 suits...for weddings and funerals, and the one I'll be buried in...like any self respecting British person.
@@nascompares 😂
two of my fave tech reviewer in one comment sec, the world is healing
Impress the sponsors.
You can put your hard drives in my spare slots anytime. I did learn a lot today. Tyvm for the video.
SATA or SCSI?
@@drakenabarion Probably IDE
So basically, 99% of us are using our M.2 slots the right way by putting an SSD in it... Thanks for the confirmation! 👌😂
Yep. I have no use for any of these alternatives in my PC. Nvme storage it is
@@A_Dirrty_Birdsome of us need to expand things like a laptop
Comments like this make it easy to know when to click "don't recommend channel"
Surprised you missed the best use, m.2 to U.2/U.3 adapters. Enterprise NVME are sometimes cheap from ebay, and the drives basically have infinite write life for most people. Not to mention that they have so many more chips on them, that they don't get the transfer rate slow down you get with consumer nvme drives, once they run out of their small caches.
Also, they usually have power loss protection capacitors and work MUCH faster if applications do fsync often (as they just ignore them).
Thank you! I'll be on eBay the rest of the night 😅
Anyone recommend a good brand adapter? I bought a M.2 to occulink to U.2 adapter on ebay, that was extremely unreliable. Great speeds, but would vanish until restart randomly. Would like to try again, if I could find a good one.
As an alternative to the ADT-Link PCIe extender, you might take a look at an M.2 Oculink adapter board and SFF-8611/8612 cabling to an external PCIe slot. Eta Prime made a video about this 3 months ago - he used a mini-PC with an existing external Oculink port connected to an eGPU, but he also displayed an adapter board that could be used in an internal M.2 NVMe slot. The parts came from Amazon. Oculink should provide superior signaling and durability over a PCIe ribbon cable.
I'm just going to sit and sulk in the corner with my MacMini, unable to play with any M.2 options, and yet I still plough through to the end of the video!
I'm forever shouting our local gulls who make a hell of a racket. You're not in SW London near a bus depot, are you?! We may be sharing the same noisy brutes!
Thunderbolt to external PCIe enclosure?
Nah, I'm on the south coast of England, in Brighton..so mad seagulls. But I grew up in east London, so spent most of my life "pigeon fightin'
@@nascompares Ha! My sympathy dwindles a tad given that you’re coastal! Quite why we have “urban gulls” is beyond me. Between those and the flipping green parakeets here, there’s no chance of recording any clean audio!! 🙄
You know you've lived in London too long when you start talking in post codes. 😂
Surprisingly useful. Didn't think of the 6x SATA or AI being options. This suddenly gives something like MS-01 almost unlimited uses (with a different case, of course). But even the most ancient of boards could suddenly have a wildly different use. My old gigabyte router-on-a-stick is going to definitely see some hacking. Thx Robbie!
THIS!
@@nascompares Think I'd rather the M.2 to x16 adapter and put a proper HBA in. Or maybe the HBA in the MB's slot and a 10gbe in the M.2. A little hesitant about a no-name adapter handling my data. 🤷
That dual SFP+ looks like what I want!
EXACTLY.
Where do I buy it? None of Amazon, Newegg or AliExpress has the LRES2224PF
@@nascompares
it appears my earlier q was eaten by a black hole... I went to the mfr website. I can't figure out how to buy it. None of the platforms it links to have that product available.
@@nascompareswhere/how to buy?
One more thing to use in M.2 is - NVME drive, but not the M.2. I found in "local" shops new (with original package and seals, have warranty) P4510 1Tb ( SSDPE2KX010T801 ) in U.2 form factor. For some reason they are twice cheaper than same/similar models with SATA interface while much faster. Aliexpress, 10$ M.2 to SFF-8643 card + SFF-8639 cable bundle and they can be installed in any motherboard with M.2!
The "crazy town banana pants" had me in stitches 🤣 Really good tips for the m.2 slot especially since boards are now coming out equipped with multiple slots now.
Guess it's time to change Synology to DIY NAS
You shouldnt be buying those anyway. So much money for so few things...you can basically build a whole PC with case that supports lots of hard drives for a fraction of a price, especially if you have an old system already - just connect it with ethernet cable and set up file transfering, and you got perfectly fine, high capacity NAS, that can also do a whole bunch of things other then storing files.
If you are a fan of DSM, try xpenology on almost any hardware :)
🙄, yeah for home use storing some movies…
it is far more caveated than simply bang in a device into the M.2 slot, by doing so you can slow down or even cripple the baandwidth on other devices as many M.2 are actually shared.
Uh... The lanes are not shared while operating, but some do disable lanes on other slots if that's what you mean.
I've actually gotten into doing things like this for my daily driver PC to get around the fact that consumer motherboards these days have taken a hatchet to expansion slots in order to dump as many lanes as possible into more M.2 slots.
Seagulls, stop it now!
Cheers. It certainly opens up a lot of options. Especially if you're building budget DIY NAS'.
Those M.2 to SATA adapters normally use something like the ASM1166 or a JMB585 which can experience some weird behaviours (e.g. The ASM1166 needs a certain level of firmware for unraid)
That's a good point (and one that is featured in another review coming soon on the channel and SHOULD have been mentioned here, but the extent of the issue wasn't as clear to me when I recorded this. Cheers for sharing and updating mate
@@nascompares The M.2 -> PCIe x16 slot -> HBA (LSI 2008) would seem preferable but it takes up a LOT more space
recommending these cards should be a criminal offense.
get a lsi card if you need more sata ports but make sure you mod it with a proper cooling first
I've even used a small GPU on an M.2 to PCIe adapter (the stick type, not cabled) for video output while the main slots were taken by SSDs and 40/56 Gbps x8 networking.
continued watching ... my world has changed!!!
Right! I got inspired to tinker.
Great video. I was all excited only to realise that my Sabertooth X79, I had already upgraded with Dual M.2 PCIe NVMe X4 Adapter and put in 2x 4TB SSD's :)
So I can't upgrade further as yet.
I tell you the Dual M.2 PCIe NVMe X4 Adapter made my 12 year old Sabertooth motherboard live longer and the drives are fast.
Ooooh, I thought I'd filled my bingo card there - I don't have an m.2 AI adapter or an m.2 to Dual SFP+ 10G, but I have all the others. The m.2 to PCIE x16 is probably the least useful, if you're into small formfactor rigs, but the 10G NIC, the 6xSATA and the wifi to dual SATA cards have been very useful. Though the wifi slots are becoming less useful, with most of the new ones being CNVio and not MiniPCIE.
If I remember correctly, M.2 is a fast enough interface that a fast enough storage device, such as an Optane module, could be configured to be effectively RAM.
Faster than the HDD I have as SWAP.
All nice, but all my slots has been spent on NVMe disks. Just love the fact that I have 3 disks and no wires to hide! The only powercords I run other than the motherboard, is the GPU. Makes a much cleaner build with modular PSUs.
I don’t know this channel but I loved the thumbnail!
Great video. I've always been keen on finding alternate uses for hardware like this that the typical user wouldn't think of doing. Especially if you build custom rigs for example which use nonconventional designs/layouts/sizes.
Very cool tips.
As a geek I'd like to try some of these uses for an nVme port. (:
That was a genuinely useful video. Nice job.
You can also convert a WiFI A+E key slot into NVME, which you can then convert to SATA or Ethernet as covered above.
Mind if I ask how I would identify such a slot, and how one converts this to PCI-E/NVMe please? I have a number of devices with unpopulated wifi slots (I'm all wired here) and being able to use those as PCI-E 1x/2x slots would come in damned handy! 👍
That mini SAS may seem useless but there are cables that can split that to 4 or maybe more SATA drives. You also can use SAS if you want where with SATA you can't. SATA drives work with SAS but SAS works with both SATA or SAS. So if you plan to use SATA drives SAS is OK for it with that cable.
The enhancements only work if its an NVME M.2 AND the use of the pcie lanes in the slot doesn't disable them elsewhere.... There are M2 nvme to multiple nvme breakouts.. cheap, one pcie lane each m2 slot. Or expensive.. pcie lane switch to provide more.
There are better things that you didn't mention. When you talked about the 2x10GbE, the device you showed was actually a re-manned SFP+ and the device to connect it was actually actually a mini-sas standard (I forget which one) but there are tons of SFF 8643 devices so if you want to go that rout use those. You have U.2 adapters and External versions for things like Jbod and backplains.
Also Occulink really deserves a shout out here. Missed opportunity.
I like the concept of using Oculink like TB or Firewire for utilising PCI-E devices in external enclosures. Obviously this is its main use case for eGPUs, but I'm thinking low power devices like my 2-slot PCI-E 3.0 1X Audio card that I can't live without. M.2 - Oculink bridge could provide a neat interface that promotes portability for SFF systems.
This is great information. I had no idea this M.2 could do anything else but Wi-Fi.
I can now use my very limited NUC i3 Intel with only 1 NIC with an extra 2.5 GB LAN as a OpnSense firewall, taking over my very poor current OpnSense firewall that can't load all the geo location database needed to stop the scam/spam and can't run the clamd antivirus plugin either due to the limitations of the resources on it. This is excellent news.
Recycling older hardware to good use :)
Those wifi M.2 cards are often USB 2. Depending on the age of the host machine, USB 2 over M.2 might be all you get. iirc, more modern M.2 wifi cards can be USB 3 and/or PCIe x2?
Some of your suggestions are going to need a larger case. I don't see a lot of point in ITX vs mATX if you're going to need more space.
sata m.2
I have never heard of a USB m.2
@@mytech6779 They do exist. This en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2#Form_factors_and_keying clearly shows which keying carries which interfaces.
@@landtimforgot Yes but the slot keying is different, you don't get USB interfaces with the common M keying used with SATA and PCIe interfaces of SSD storage. Just physically won't mate.
That's amazing. So much interesting stuff we can build with these.
I stopped waiting for a new Synology model with real hardware and picked up a supermicro on eBay and been in love.
In my current system there are no M.2s but im building a new PC and i did not know that these slots can be used for anything else. Thats a lot of info, thanks
Very, very useful video. Thank you (as always) for the ideas that just hadn't crossed my Simple Mind yet.
As a low-income hacker, I'd noticed that classic HDDs at a certain UK secondhand retailer seemed to be coming down in price quite a lot, and 05:00 finally explains for why. Looks like I'm going to have to remember to keep hold of those S-ATA I/F cards for the forseeable, especially as I imagine that there'll be no classic/magnetic devices built for the M.2 standard at all, which makes long-term data storage and archival a pig. 🐷
Going to have to dig out a pinout of the M.2 standard and learn a bit more about it. I thought it was just a storage interface, not a _complete_ PCI-Express 4x4 interface! 😳
And yes, I wish I could be this handsome too. If I was then I could also produce UA-cam content that people would actually watch, rather than my videos being shadowbanned and my comments being dropped left right and centre because platforms don't like those with diversity _and_ handicaps... 🌻🏳🌈😢
M2-to-SATA is not equal to normal SATA ports. For example, it does not let HDDs go to sleep mode (actually, they enter sleep mode and wake up immediately). I had to junk this card
It depends on the chip used. Even some cheap ones in USB enclosures spin down your drives! Asmedia ones let your CPU go to low energy states and sleep your drives.
The fact is PCIe is PCIe and you can get the same chip on M2 you can get as PCIe card
@@leito1996 my nvme-to-sata is (said) based asm1166, which should be not bad, but still SATA disks are not span down. Sata disk is taken offline in Windows so nobody is accessing it , I put it to sleep via command like, then it stops, then it spins up right away
Nice! I have six Dell Wyse 5070’s and I was wondering how to turn one into a NAS. That SATA adapter (and probably using the WiFi slot) sounds like a real solution. Thanks for the tips
I was listening to you while working. My brain registered your accent but my attention was divided. So I was sitting here wondering what the heck an Aye Aye adaptor is. Does that let you connect a pirate ship to your M.2? Anyway, thanks for this little roundup, great video.
A year ago I bought one of those m.2 to 10gbe adapters for my system because I was out of PCIe slots. For reference, I was using a ryzen 5950x on an x570 chipset. My observations that you didn't have on your review that I feel are important and I'd love further investigation.
First, the included thimble sized heat sink was not adequate as it would overheat and then I'd lose network connectivity. I had to replace it with something more robust. Seeing I was in it to win it, I used a thermalright fully active m.2 cooler. That solved the overheating.
Second, because the device is a b+m key, I was only getting PCIe x2, NOT x4. It was easily verfied with a lspci -vv command and it always showed the device ws downgraded. Because of that, performance was nerfed and I coulnd't get 10gbe with iperf even when running parallels.
My solution was then to use an m.2 to PCIe adapter like you had, then a 10gbe card (running the same aquantia chipset). Boom, iperf gave 9+.
Well, I need more M2 slots for my SSDs. I have already used 2 PCIe slots for SSDs as well.
The big problem that makes most of this pointless is that the M2 slots share the bus of PCIe slots, meaning that utilizing them prevents using the PCIe slots they are paired with. You have to pick one or the other, especially on enthusiast class boards.
Only problem I know of these little M.2 slots is that when you actually plugin a 10GB Network Card or a GPU.. it get hot as hell, burning hot. But I heared you can plug like over a 100 USB ports on them.. thats insane!
This got me thinking how many Floppy Drives I could add using one M.2 slot. Not for speed and definitely not for capacity but merely for nostalgic geek image.
I would pay good money to see you plug one of those m.2 to PCI-E adapters into one of the new Microsoft Surface units that has the m.2 upgrade slot. you would probably have to completely disassemble the tablet and alter the housing but it would be AWESOME! LOL. put a 4070 or something like that on it. lol. I know there would be a bottleneck from hell there but it would be hilarious and cool to see if the system could recognize it and utilize it!! Could you imagine being in a library gaming with a 4070 setting on the table 🤣🤣 That would be the best conversation starter.... EVER! lol Don't forget to take your power supply with you as well! LOL 🤣🤣
I just had an even better idea. Take some thick acrylic and make a box with ventilation and somehow fix the Surface in the front of it and put the graphics card and power supply in there! LOL. That would be awesome! you could make a portable DIY Surface gaming rig lol.
esentially m.2 is basically just a repackaged pcie, sata or usb connector or a mix of those
for example wifi key m.2 often carry 2x pcie and 1 usb , nvme carries 4x pcie and so on and in many cases standards are interchangable
i am using my dedicated x16 pcie port on my motherboard wrong because i put m.2 adapter into it just to have 2 nvme drives on my desktop computer
full size graphic card would not fit into it anyway
and on my laptop i desoldered sd card reader chip just to add m.2 socket on cables for another ssd support and dualboot a cheap hp laptop with no upgradable storage
i am much more upset about x4 pcie slot not being popular on desktop boards because making ssd that slots into that would be much easier with much more space for radiators and no need for screws and other laptop things could also be plugged in there, but for some reason bubblegum slot is better form factor even on desktop where space is not a constrain
making it worse and placing it often under gpu slot and making ssd's die from excesive heat
5:05
The idea of having a sweet server board with 2 built in miniSAS HD and then going with janky m2 to sata adapter seems quite wrong to me.
Especially if you live in US you should have a wide variety of SAS breakout cables and SAS backplanes available, should just go with those IMHO.
(Personally just got a 4 bay hotswap rack for my server with miniSAS HD but sadly i didn't notice that the cable is a separate purchase so still need to get one)
My daily driver has a RTX 2070s running over m.2 and I'm quite happy with it
These options shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone, as they've been around for years with the previous Mini PCIe (mPCIe) form factor... of which M.2 PCIe (NVMe) is just a more modern version of.
My 2 x M2 Slots in my NAS elevated it to 18 SATA connections. But only because it already had 6 x 2.5G Ethernet
You can get an Intel Optane chip to make HDDs as fast a SSDs if you have Intel 10th generation or earlier.
Hey there. New to the channel. Very useful. YT algorithm sent me after searching for SATA slots. Littlehampton beach here, and can't tell my live seagulls from yours! 🙂
M2 is basically pcie already so a lot of this stuff isn’t surprising. Interesting tho
What i want is m2 to as many pcie x1 as i can get.
And compatibility with the radxa rock 5 itx
You are looking for pretty crazy custom boards there! The sorta thing that needs a special onboard controller. Not like the expander 4xm.2 card that the Lockerstor gen 2 and 3 use
Sick! Thanks for sharing your insights.
Did not know that thanks, mate
First 16 seconds sounded a lot like an april fools joke buildup.
Oh..and weak attempt at humour...or both!
I haven't been using my m.2 wrong, i've been using it for what i want to use it for.
I managed to double the speed of my M.2 NVME Gen4 SSD with one simple trick. Put in the Gen4 slot instead of the Gen3 one. I'm too ashamed to say how long it was in the wrong place.
'crazy town banana pants' challenge: working this into every day conversation
This is great and all, but as I only have a laptop with one M.2 drive I will stick to using it as storage. Funny, you say wired is reliable, stable and consistent, but my EE Wi-Fi has been exactly that for 6 months. And, it is faster than my home broadband, which is why I ditched my home broadband for my phone hotspot internet. It's also a lot cheaper. Horses for courses I guess.
Lovein ya work chap
Would love to have a video on alternative use for wifi card slot
What about a video on what we can do with those pretty useless M.2 NGFF SATA 2042 ports they keep putting in the NUCs and its clones? Useless because actual SATA SSDs of that format are extremely expensive.
Oddly enough, when NVMe launched, it was far more expensive then NGFF drives, right up until everyone figured out how much better it is for storage, and the production volumes went up and the prices came down.
I'll save you 10min32sec : an M.2 slot is usally just another PCIE 3.0/4.0 1X/2X/4X, here you go (unless it's a specific old laptop wifi port which wouldn't have every pins necessary to be pcie port, but just MSATA or over things)
I knew it was a clickbait, but I had to click it😭😭
make sure to get NVME instead of SATA for M.2 slots if using an SSD,, they are almost as fast as the Ram...
as for internet speeds, a lot of people don't realize it but 1mbps is more than fast enough for majority of uses... I only use 15mbps on my home internet with 1 other person using also...
People are just shoving their money into ISP pockets and getting nothing in return...
This is an amazing idea of a video thank you
Cheers bud!
You should put together a list with all your links in one place(just put a note that prices can change). I wanted to check some of the motherboards you where referencing, however you only listed links for the cards.
thare are still a lot of questions about smart ups systems budget and others, i follow some reddit threads and most people are still questioning what kind of ups they should get and if its able to connect (software) to their nas so it neatly turns it off on time. what are the best picks for late 2024, that works on ;asustor, Qnap and Sygnology?
Thanks for the information. My problem is that many of the products shown here are apparently not yet available for purchase. I would be particularly interested in the M.2 to SFP+ cards, then I would no longer have to take the detour via OCuLink. Even my Retro XP PC can access the 10G network via OCuLink. However, OCuLink has an advantage that should not be underestimated: The SFP+ card can be quickly moved from one PC to the next.
I have one PCIe NVMe M.2 connector for a SSD drive in my laptop and one in my mini PC and both have exactly what's supposed to be connected to them -- the C: drive (512 GB in the laptop, 2 TB in the mini PC).
Great video
I've added washing machine on my spare nvme slot.
Keep the Excellent Job!!!
Thanks man
most of us buy a board that has BT, WIFI and such and use our M.2 slots for storage.
I actually went the opposite way by putting a PCIe to M.2 card with a Hailo 8L in my UGREEN DXP6800 Pro. 😁
What is the current use case for an AI Accelerator in Window these days? I have a spare M.2 slot, and that could be something I would experiment with.
Suprised opening 😮"oh hello there"... Matthew Corbett and Sooty has enter the chat.
10/10 reference!!!!
Can you talk more about SSD caches and options on True/FreeNAS and unRAID for both write and read caches that don't use a mover?
You only tested the M.2 NIC with TrueNAS Scale, right? How's the compatibility with Core?
Can you start from the beginning? I didn’t understand what you were saying once you started talking
4:36 Can we talk about how a guy that's only used to voice operated computers can suddenly type at 1000wpm? On a qwerty keyboard no less, because apparently humanity never moved up to dvorak.
Got an idea to remove my wifi and replace it with nvme adaptor. Thanks!
I connected a hot air popcorn popper to my M.2 connection.
I wish my board had more m.2 slots. I only it only has two. But I searched a while for an matx board with intel alterlake w680 chipset to have ecc support.
Both slots are used for SSDs. One for Proxmox and the VMs and one for data that changes often or I want to be fast.
Thankfully I have a PCIe x4 slot left for another card if I want to upgrade to 10g Ethernet.
OKay then, check adaptors^^
Since I use my pc for gaming, I only need it for ssd.
My media pc, again, I only need it for ssd.
😂
But all the other options are great for those that can use them.
7:47 for the seagulls
After skimming chapter titles I’m confident I can tell UA-cam not to recommend this channel and never miss anything important.
Not sure what happened in your life that led you to 'go negative' bud, but hope you get better. It's a waste of a life to be negative for the sake of it.
Not to rain on the excellent parade of ideas, but people need to remember that the older or cheaper boards and mini pcs may only have PCIe 3.0 (~8 Gigabits/s per lane) or only a x1 slot, or both limits. All part of Intels goal to cripple the Atoms and J/N series cpus. "Oh you wanted more fast lanes, please buy a far more expensive cpu!" 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️. On the upside PCIe has its speed in both directions at once. 👍
This could turn a old PC into a relatively useful NAS - putting in a 10GB M.2 card and a router?
Could a PCIe gen 5 M.2 Be converted to a PCIe gen 3 x 16 GPU slot effectively?
ssds still the best use for m2s regardless. i don't have enough slots actually.
To say you're using it "wrong" is pretty clickbaity at best, as opposed to PCIe slot can be used for multiple types of devices. Bu that wouldn't get quite as many clicks.
Broadcom sold a media accelerator once, mini pcie format. Allowed older laptops and pcs to smooth playback of h.264 HD content.
It should be made more explicit that Coral is ONLY good for object recognition tasks, and thus only good for a security system. It is an incredibly weak NPU with a very small memory pool. No problem if you're just doing object recognition for a security camera or two, but it will never help you do any of the really popular and fun AI projects. Projects like image generation, large language models, STT, TTS to Voice, and RVT vocal encoders, it simply doesn't have the memory capacity or bandwidth for any of that.
Why is the pcie slot connection card for M.2 SSD wired, is it to hide the m.2 ssd for case airflow?