Icy Dock has introduced a new adapter that can house up to four M.2-2280 solid-state drives (SSDs) with a PCIe Gen5 x4 interface and run them in RAID mode. The card is designed primarily for those who need ultra-fast storage and run high-end desktop processors, such as AMD Ryzen Threadripper and Intel Xeon W.
Icy Dock’s ExpressSlot MB204MP-B adapter hosts four M.2-2280 (or smaller) SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface, but it requires PCIe bifurcation on the motherboard level as it does not have its own PCIe switch. On the one hand, this makes it relatively cheap, but on the other hand it needs an expensive platform, such as AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper and Intel’s Xeon W that can bifurcate a PCIe x16 slot onto four x4 ‘slots’ and support AMD RAID or Intel VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) technologies to enable multiple SSDs to work in various RAID modes (RAID 0/1/5/10 modes are supported).
