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As far as I can tell, building a similar system using NVMe is vastly more complicated. If you can fit everything into M.2 slots, it’s easy. Otherwise you need barely-standardized PCIe cards, backplanes, connectors ordered off a menu of enterprise things with bizarre model numbers, and possibly “RAID” cards even though you don’t actually want hardware RAID.


22TB of NVMe drives is going to be a bit more expensive than the system in the article however.

I do wonder what the power consumption figures would be though. His system was drawing an annoyingly large amount of power and I suspect that was mostly those HDDs.


You can use pcie switches on pcie x4 to 4xM.2x4 drives.


The active pcie switches are a lot more expensive than the passive splitters that only work on systems with pcie bifurcation.


Nowadays some recent consumer platforms supports PCIe x16 to x4/x4/x4/x4 bifurcation that should be enough. For RAID, switching (dynamically shares bandwidth between SSDs) is nonsense, isn't it?


For a large scale storage system (more NVMe devices than PCIe lanes), a switch is mandatory. Or a “RAID” card or another switch-like device.


If your motherboard is new enough. I run my home NAS+server on 2013-era enterprise hardware and use a Supermicro AOC-SHG3-4M2P to make it work.




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