If, like me, you hopped on the NVMe train early you probably have an assortment of old drives laying around. I’ve long since tossed my 128GB, 256GB and 512GB drives, but in front of me as I write this I have five 1TB drives sitting in front of me. For whatever reason, I just don’t have the heart to get rid of them. Surely, I’ll find a use for them, right? Well, Sabrent wants to help me out with that, and they are releasing a 4-drive NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter card (say that 10 times fast!) to do exactly that. Built as a way to utilize older drives, or to add capability to older systems, this adapter can take four M-Key 2280 SSDs and can be run in RAID/JBOD. Suddenly you’ve got terabytes of redundant high-speed storage at your fingertips, and without needing to swap your motherboard. As we work through the teething pains of DDR5, expensive GPUs, and marginally improved CPUs, I can understand a user’s reluctance to upgrade. This can stretch the life of your system nicely, and help remove some of the old tech you’ve got laying around at the process. Let’s get into the specifics:
The EC-P3X4 has also been designed to be compliant with a number of power states and other features for optimal efficiency. This includes Active State Power Management (ASPM) with the L0s/L1/ L23/L3 power states and L1 sub-states. It’s also compliant with the S3 and S4 sleep states for further power control. The adapter also supports Latency Tolerance Reporting (LTR), Advanced Error Reporting (AER), and Separate Reference Clock with Independent Spread (SRIS) for maximum compatibility and state management. This makes it plug and play for most systems. Windows 8.1+ or macOS 10.3.3+ is recommended.
The card is effectively an aluminum heat sink sandwich, with integrated silicone thermal padding to ensure your drives stay cool and never throttle.
We’ve got one of these headed our way to test, so I’m eager to see if it can live up to its lofty promises. Stay tuned!
You can pick up a Sabrent 4-Drive NVMe M.2 SSD 3.0 x4 Adapter for $179 at Amazon.
Ron Burke is the Editor in Chief for Gaming Trend. Currently living in Fort Worth, Texas, Ron is an old-school gamer who enjoys CRPGs, action/adventure, platformers, music games, and has recently gotten into tabletop gaming.
Ron is also a fourth degree black belt, with a Master's rank in Matsumura Seito Shōrin-ryū, Moo Duk Kwan Tang Soo Do, Universal Tang Soo Do Alliance, and International Tang Soo Do Federation. He also holds ranks in several other styles in his search to be a well-rounded fighter.
Ron has been married to Gaming Trend Editor, Laura Burke, for 28 years. They have three dogs - Pazuzu (Irish Terrier), Atë, and Calliope (both Australian Kelpie/Pit Bull mixes), and an Axolotl named Dagon!
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