Aurora R11, Storage Upgrade Considerations

Thats an excellent point! Should I go 970 evo with adapter or clone the current put it at the m2 slot and get adapter for the 1 TB m2?

I like the Samsung Evo 970 lineup.  

They also have the 980 out now, but you wouldn't be able to take full advantage of it with 10th Gen Intel (the 980 supports PCIe 4.0, your CPU doesn't). 

Another consideration is that the cost of M2 NVME SSDs has gone up in the past month or so.  There was always a premium to go the m2 NVME route, it had gone down in the quarter leading up to Christmas, but it has gone up again recently, along with price hikes for GPUs, motherboards, PSUs. 

An alternative would be to just install windows and programs on the boot drive, 1TB is usually overkill for boot for example without games or big personal files.

If the saturation is due to the heavy graphic files that your son is developing, I would first estimate his needs and install twice the size as a secondary drive, after all he needs to do is move all his personally created files to the secondary drive.

I would suggest you seriously consider some form of backup solution, e.g. get a NAS, big drives and install a GIT server. I have a DS418play with 3x3TB drives giving nearly 6TB of storage, this is where I keep everything to make it "computer independant". A simpler alternative is to just get an external drive and tell him to back up regularly

Thank you very much for your suggestions! Actually we currently have a Buffalo NAS. Getting old but still doing a good job.

One last question. I found this on Amazon - Asus Hyper M.2 PCIe Adapter. There is a newer version for PCIe 4.0 but that's just waste of money. Nevertheless here is the Asus description - Asus Site for Gen 4 Adapter 

Supports up to 4 m.2 drives and also support Intel VROC. That sounds really tempting and not very expensive. What are your thoughts on that? If I understand correctly, R11 runs Z490 motherboard. Seems both MB and CPU would support that... Thank you again!

The R11 doesn't support lane bifurcation so you would need an adapter with a switch otherwise you will only see one ssd max. The cheapest options start around $100 or more.

Just read more about bifurcation. Don't think it is worthy to look at adapters with a bridge.

Looking at some other adapters. Saw some adapters that have both SATA and NVMe. What is the performance of PCIe compared to SATA? Any specific single NVMe to PCIe adapters? Seems there are tons of those. Should I look for x4, x8, x16? Not sure what are the options in the R11. I saw somewhere that 3080 takes the x16. Couldnt find how many are on the board. Any performance benefit x16 vs x4/x8?

Thanks a lot! 

The R11's x16 slot runs at x8. You can put an x4 or larger PCIE nvme adapter in there.  It will only use 8 lanes max though.  Also, the M2 drive only uses 4 lanes so any adapter with more than x4 probably has slots for more than 1 M2 NVME SSD.  

You would want an M2 "M Key" NVME pcie adapter.  It would be on average 6 times faster than a SATA SSD.

You have two x16 slots on the motherboard, the GPU would be installed on the top one, so you have the bottom one left over.  But you can plug an x4 adapter into the bottom slot.  

Thank you very much for your input! Do you have experience with any of the adapters?

Based on some recent postings on this board, the compatibility for the NVME PCIE cards does not look great.

There's 1 posting from someone who's drive keeps disappearing, and another person who has his card only running at X1 instead of X4 link speed.

I would look at Sata SSD's for expansion, either in "hardware" raid, or windows drive space.

Besides speed you would also want to have some sense off data loss prevention. I think with 3 SSD's and windows drive space, you would be able to have increased speed and reliability over a single SSD.

Even with 2 regular SSD's you could select speed or reliability.

Not the same as an M2 drive, but still fast enough for video editing IMHO.

I am also considering an additional SSD in the R11 but am concerned about the heat put out by M.2 nvme SSDs given that the Pcie card they would mount to has to be so close the GPU.   For the post above that has 2 of these running now, do you see heat impacts to the GPU or the SSDs?  I am also considering a less preferable alternative standard sata SSD in the 2.5" drive bay to allow some more room between that heat source and the GPU, but of course they aren't as fast in sustained read/write as the m.2 NVME, although I have read that for game play (FPS) it doesn't really matter which style of SSD is used (m.2 or sata ssd) as they both work way better than an HDD and in gaming you aren't using sustained read/write speeds anyhow where the m.2 nvme would perform better.   

There are some very low-profile adapters. I don't believe they will impede on the graphic card cooling. I would avoid WD Black m.2 since I read quite a few reviews of people complaining that they run pretty hot. I am waiting on 970 Evo Plus price to go down before I jump. But it would be good to hear from someone who installed it. I have 3080 card and btw I inly see once PCi slot right next to the graphic card.

"Thank you very much for your input! Do you have experience with any of the adapters?"

I have several, I buy the cheap low profile (PCB-visible from all angles) adapters.  I've never experienced problems.  Most come with an optional heatsink you can mount on the NVME.  

The person who initially reported x1 speed got his m2 adapter replaced, turns out it was defective, and it is working properly now.  

Thank you! Do you see any significant performance differences between one adapter vs another? Honestly, I wouldn't expect to see anything huge but wanted to check first. Thanks again!