Syba Dual M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x16 Riser Card - Supports Non-Bifurcation Motherboards (SI-PEX40129) | High-Speed SSD Expansion for Gaming PC, Workstation & Data Storage

I purchased two of these boards. Each board has the option for two M.2 drives. They provide amazing performance on my older i7 board which only has PCIe 2.0a support. My previous M.2 board did not have the onboard chip which is apparently a PCIe lane "switch" which basically allows more use of the slot bus. The M.2 cards I installed are PCIe 3.0 x4 cards so on my old card this would translate to PCIe 2.0 x4 since the motherboard did not support PCIe 3.0. Due to the fact that each PCIe 3.0 "lane" is twice the speed of a PCIe 2.0 lane I would not get half the performance. The onboard "switch" processor allows use of more lanes and allows near PCIe 3.0 performance. Keep in mind that having two M.2's on one card mean they still share the slot bandwidth.Windows does not support booting from software created striped volumes and the cards don't have a RAID chip on them to create hardware RAID. Actually, I wish this card did support hardware RAID such as striped volumes, it would be a great feature.What I did is purchase two cards and placed four M.2's on them. I placed my C drive on one (Windows). Then I placed a smaller cheaper M.2 on the second card as extra storage because due to the PCIe "lane switching" placing only one M.2 on the card will cause lockups and system freezes. In slot two on both cards I place high speed 1TB M.2's and created a striped volume. Placing them on separate cards allow them to utilize separate "switch" processors to ensure maximum performance. Then I reinstalled Windows and interrupted the installation to set the Users and Program folders to my striped volume. Then on my first login, I moved the page file to my striped volume. Now I have maximum performance out of my two M.2's with a total 2 TB on the striped volume.Thus far the setup works great HDD access is amazingly fast and probably faster than anything the creators of this motherboard expected. Also, I created a large 50-100 GB swap file because the drive is really fast so paging does not provide a noticeable slow down and effectively gives me all the memory space I need. I typically just leave everything open and running allowing me to quickly return to things.Overall, if you are looking for the maximum performance out of your PCIe 3.0 M.2's this is THE card for you.Pros: - On a PCIe 2.0 system this is likely the fastest way to add an M.2 HDD - Allows extreme performance even on a PCIe 3.0 slot. - PCIe lane Switch processor allows nearly full use of the slot - M.2 Cooling features like thermal pads heat spreader and fan. - Allows two (or more) M.2's in one slot (a lot of other cheaper cards have one M.2 one slot)Cons: - Does not have hardware RAID, I realize this may require a different processor, but it is a big feature. - Requires both M.2 slots to be populated due the PCIe lane switching. - While the SATA hard drive interface comes on the motherboard this requires the purchase of a 200 dollar card.