If you’re even remotely familiar with PC components, you may have noticed a bunch of PCIe (or Peripheral Component Interconnect express) slots on the motherboard. For most people, only the largest of these slots is useful, since that’s where you’re supposed to plug in your bulky graphics card. That said, bringing additional processing power to a gaming rig isn’t the only use case where these expansion slots come in handy.
For example, I have a PCIe network card That not only prevented the faulty Ethernet controller on my motherboard, but also improved file transfer speeds on my LAN. But aside from this somewhat expensive investment, I also installed a couple of PCIe port expanders in my home lab and on general-purpose devices, and my PCIe to NVMe adapters were the most convenient PC upgrade I’ve ever invested in.
Budget motherboards tend to have limited M.2 ports
And don’t even get me started on used server mobos.
Call me cheap if you must, but I mostly prefer cheap motherboards when building a new PC. Even then, I prioritize my budget on good quality VRM, easy BIOS flashback functionality, and other quality of life aspects for the mobo. This means that advanced features like triple M.2 slots remain out of reach, as I’d have to shell out an extra $100 to $200 for better quality motherboards, money I could allocate to my GPU budget.
Unfortunately, budget motherboards tend to get cheaper on the M.2 connectivity front, and I’m not just talking about manufacturers cutting costs by restricting these slots to PCIe Gen 4 speeds. One of my AM4 motherboards has a single M.2, while the one I use for my workstation has two of them. It’s not a deal breaker, but considering all the LLM hosting, gaming, and video editing tasks I put it through, I’d prefer to use fast NVMe drives over their (comparatively slower) SATA counterparts.
That’s before I even talk about myself. server centric systems. I’ve bought a handful of recycled systems, including full Xeon mobos, and the dearth of M.2 slots on these otherwise goldmine server rigs is a real bummer. Heck, my dual-Xeon workstation only has one M.2 port where I can connect NVMe drives, which is far from enough to host the dozens of virtual guests I want to run on this giant system.
A spare NVMe drive was just what my gaming system needed
Especially since I use it as an LLM hosting workstation.
Considering that SSDs tend to slow down when they are almost full, I prefer to keep at least 15-20% free space on my daily driver. With Windows 11 already hogging up dozens of GB and my productivity tools (and, more importantly, video editing projects) consuming almost as much free space as Microsoft’s bloated operating system, I had to move my games from my C: drive to another NVMe drive that I added to the second M.2 slot on my computer.
If you’ve seen the gargantuan file sizes on modern PC titles, it shouldn’t surprise you that I can only keep a handful of triple-A titles and texture mods on my secondary SSD without the free space reaching the red zone. But the real problem lies in my AI models.
Some of the larger models can easily take up dozens of GB, and since I started experimenting with different quantization rates, the amount of space these clunks can end up taking up is crazy. Then you have the imaging (or rather enhancement) models that I use for my Krita-based photo editing tasks. Let’s say the situation got so bad that at one point, WizTree represented the root folder that housed my AI files as the biggest blot on its space utilization graph.
Since SATA SSDs would be a bit slow to load LLM, I wanted to use NVMe drives at all costs. Fortunately, all I needed was a cheap $15 adapter board and a spare PCIe slot to connect my main workstation with high-speed NVMe drives for my AI models.
But it’s my server that benefits the most from PCIe to NVMe adapters
Even PCIe Gen 3 SSDs are a huge speed improvement over older, bulky HDDs.
Unlike my daily driver, where I only plugged one NVMe adapter into its PCIe socket, I’ve already built my Xeon workstation with two of them. Now, I still keep my archived media on full hard drives, but things are radically different when it comes to my development virtual machines, productivity containers, and random virtual guests that I use for experiments.
Relying on slow hard drives for my server projects would reduce the responsiveness of my virtual guests and I would have to deal with slow startup speeds when spinning up new virtual machines for my DevOps experiments. Since I’ve already maxed out my SATA drive bays on my home server, adding additional NVMe SSDs via PCIe adapters helped me accommodate all my virtual guests on my Warmachine Xeon without over-provisioning storage resources.
