wardog wrote: parsec wrote: This is not so hard to figure out, if you have some experience with PCIe NVMe SSDs. Says you. Is there any drive interface you haven't thoroughly run through the ringer there yet?

Some people love video cards, I love SSDs. Drive IO is the slowest thing in a PC, what better way to speed things up?

Not many other drive interfaces to use with a PC. Interface is the main point, SATA is one, so is NVMe. Both need a driver to operate, and a little UEFI/BIOS magic to boot from. NVMe SSDs are not unique hardware devices in that each one needs special support. We don't need that for SATA drives, the same goes for NVMe drives.

We can use SATA III SSDs on a SATA II or even SATA I interface. PCIe just sends data back and forth, the driver program does the magic of converting the data into the format each side needs. Video card data won't mean anything to a SATA or NVMe driver, but a video card driver deals with it fine. You can use a PCIe 3.0 compatible video card on a PCIe 2.0 interface mother board, right?

The hardware level data interface for SATA drives is what? It's not SATA, that is a data protocol, not a data transport mechanism. It's actually a type of PCIe, used to be PCIe 2.0, now Intel has PCIe 3.0 in their 100 series chipsets, although they call in DMI 3.0, previously DMI 2.0. AMD might use something else, but I doubt it. The Microsoft generic msahci SATA driver can be used with Intel and AMD chipsets.

I sure don't own every NVMe SSD made, but as long as I have a driver for it, it will work.

parsec wrote: There are M.2 to PCIe slot adapter cards that can be used with M.2 NVMe SSDs. You could use one of the adapter cards in the PCIE3 or PCIE5 slot, and provide a PCIe 2.0 x4 interface to the RD400. But since the interface is PCIe 2.0, you won't get the full performance of the RD400.

That's what I thought. Thanks for the clarification parsec.
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I used an Intel 750 NMVe SSD in my ASRock Z77 board. With an i7-2600K, it supports PCIe 2.0. I had one of those in the board, and that SSD worked fine, a little slower on the large file sequential read speed. But I did have a PCIe 2.0 x4 connection. I then put an i5 Ivy Bridge CPU in the board, which supports PCIe 3.0, and I then had the full large file sequential read speed. That's using benchmark programs to test speeds. Real world usage is always slower, monitor drive speed while installing a program, if it peaks at 100MB/s, that is fast. Other factors such as latency are more significant.

Dunno why but cant seem to recover acct so had to make new, Still as yet no reply from ASRock and amazon has been and gone, do see on the extremely limited documentation that it is PCIe Gen2 compatible so there's that. Tiny lil bugger got it and some lil cushion/pad/heatsink maybe?...not sure ...have to DL manual and drivers yet

Still awaiting reply from Asrock but found on Toshiba tech support in reply to if an NVMe enabled MB was needed to use the rd-400/A, the reply was that it can be used in ANY MB that supports M.2 or PCIe storage devices , NVMe is only needed if it is to be used as a boot drive. Though in looking at its full specs it says : PCIe Express Base Specification Revision 3.1. with no mention of backwards compatibilty...

Try and beat Amazon by at least trying to call them. And remember, there in CA it's PST.

Amazon shipping is speedy.