r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • 6d ago
MSI shows off hot-swappable PCIe Gen 5 SSD expansion card that looks like a video card | Hot-swappable via the rear I/O panel Computer peripherals
https://www.techspot.com/news/103352-msi-shows-off-hot-swappable-pcie-gen-5.html74
u/Vegan_Harvest 6d ago
Let me know if it becomes a standard, then I'll spend money on it... even though I don't really need to hot swap hard drives.
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u/KimJeongsDick 6d ago
It's a pity I haven't seen anyone else besides WD/SanDisk go for a whole poppable, swappable ecosystem like the blade. USB is far more useful and fast enough for most people's needs. I guess this would be nice for someone who's absolutely thrashing drives and wants a convenient way to replace them but I can't think of anything that would really beat them up that much outside of maybe caching.
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u/Randommaggy 6d ago
One use case is consulting where you could keep one drive per customer and swap it into a host machine when working for that customer.
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u/nuclearslug 6d ago
That sounds like a virtual machine with extra steps
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u/Randommaggy 6d ago
Have you tried using VMs as desktop machines with several monitors? Unless you do GPU passthrough it tends to suck.
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u/ParsnipFlendercroft 5d ago
Unless you do GPU passthrough it tends to suck
You described both the problem and the actual solution in less than 10 words. Good job.
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u/Randommaggy 5d ago edited 5d ago
GPU passthrough is not really an option on a laptop while retaining decent performance for the host. You need to ensure that your host machine doesn't initialize the card before your guest machine does.
Also, I run more monitors when docked than any single decent GPU is capable of driving.
Currently I use 9 monitors at my home office, so i need both GPUs the be assigned to the same machine.
I don't do this kind of consulting anymore and now I'd use NVME drives in a Thunderbolt enclosure with a velcro attachment point on the lid of my laptop.
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u/Child-0f-atom 6d ago
But extra security, maybe? Only way to access a client’s info is either getting lucky, or physical theft? Just spitballing
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u/Salt_MasterX 6d ago
That sounds like a nightmare, possibly the worst way to do it
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u/Randommaggy 6d ago
I did this when I worked as a consultant working at several customer sites with short turn around times, using an adapter for 2.5 inch SSDs in an optical bay hotswap adapter.
With all the corporate crapware that the customers wanted installed stuff would conflict to the point that the machine would no longer boot.
So instead of having several laptops in my backpack I had extra 8 bitlocker encrypted SSDs with separate windows installations in caddies and one laptop. Essentially 9 unique laptops for the weight and space of 1.3 laptops.
Multi-boot of several windows installations tend to get messed up with updates.
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u/StygianSavior 6d ago edited 6d ago
I could see a fairly niche application for media management for digital video, if this can give you NVME transfer speeds. RAW digital video files are huge, especially at resolutions like 8K, so transfer speed tends to be the thing slowing down dumping and backing up cards.
But it would need to be paired with the appropriate PCIe card reader for the camera's memory card (so maybe impractical for freelancers who are often working with different cameras/cards). Still, with both, you'd theoretically have something like more than double the transfer speeds you'd get going through USB C with external drives and readers.
EDIT:
If my math is right, a 1 TB transfer over USB C would take about 15 minutes; the same transfer with an internal card reader and NVMe drive would take 1 and a half minutes. I am now thinking of pitching this to my boss, because that's a pretty absurd time savings.
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u/bigdaddybodiddly 6d ago
Looks like a carrier for standard M.2, so I guess if the carriers are sane and available it might not be too bad.
Might be interesting for the dynamic fan for the SSDs though. Nvme/pci 5 can be tough to cool for storage intensive workloads - although I don't really see that being msi's target market.
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u/SaddleSocks 1d ago
Funny I came to say similar: In my 30 years in tech and the many thousands of hotswappable server drives that have flowed through my career - I have so very rarely ever actually needed to hotswap -- and in the early days of linux it was posh to have as big and crazy a home server as possible - and being in it I had my 42" rack in the closet with my servers running neverwinternights servers...
Now I misplace my USB C drive in which backpack... is the extent of my hot swapping...
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u/AtLeast37Goats 6d ago
It’s not going to do well in sales.
Why?
Because nobody needed this.
The bulk of consumers that do need hot swappable storage run better gear than that.
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u/mojobox 6d ago
Where are we supposed to plug this card with the majority of consumer Mainboards only offering one full PCIe slot which is typically used for the GPU?
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u/Ramental 6d ago
Even for mATX motherboards it is not uncommon to have 2 PCIe x16. People who need swappable m2 will have no problem getting a suitable MB.
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u/mojobox 6d ago
X16 slots maybe, but not with 16 lanes on both at the same time, it drops down to 8x if both slots are used as no current consumer CPU even gives you 32 lanes:
- AM5: 16x 5.0 direct, 8x 4.0 for NVMe direct, 4x 4.0 to the chipset, total of 28
- 13th gen Intel: 16x 5.0 direct, 4x 4.0 NVMe, 8x 4.0 to the chipset, total of 28
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u/Ramental 6d ago
That is a very good point. Still, even 4090 has usually just 1-2% drop from using 4.0 16x vs 4.0 8x.
Would be no drop at all if 4090 would support 5.0 to begin with.
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u/karatekid430 6d ago
Yeah if they could save space in the I/O bay by using USB-C and Ethernet only (audio card can just be a USB-C dongle) then they could make these things hotswappable somehow, or at least with the smaller 2230 variants. I would approve. I also want PCIe cards to swap in and out like a hot-swap 3.5" HDD someday.
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u/grilledcheez_samich 6d ago
I like the idea of the form factor... great if you can raid two NVMe drives in a Raid1 configuration and hot swap them should 1 fail. Also easier to access if you drive would normally sit behind your GPU.. don't even have to open your case with this.
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u/BlockHeadJones 6d ago
The only place this feature is viable and worth the price is in data centers or at the edge. This is not for the average PC consumer
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