Asus announces the Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 card at CES 2020-- an add-in card providing customers with further storage expansion, as well as means to "tap into the incredible bandwidth of PCIe 4.0."
The card offers four M.2 slots, each with four lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity. The slots are diagonally positioned, allowing the flexibility to fit 2242, 2260, 2280 and 22110 form factor (the first two digits denote width, the following digits length in mm) M.2 cards. In turn the card supplies up to 14W of power to each M.2 SSD, enough to run the storage devices "at full potential," at least according to Asus.
The company says customers can fit the card with four 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs and set up a RAID configuration to create a "massive 8TB storage array able to communicate using up to 256Gbps of potential bandwidth." Such performance, Asus adds, is x4 a single PCIe 4.0 SSD, and up to x8 faster than mainstream PCIe 3.0 SSDs.
In further details, the card has a blower fan to keep SSDS cool, together with thermal pads for installed drives to make contact with the large brushed aluminium shroud. In case the customer does not need the active cooling, the fitting bracket includes a dip switch together with four activity LEDs.
Asus still has to announce when the Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 card ships.
Go The Hyper M.2 X16 Gen 4 Card Takes RAID Performance to the Next Level
