Hello, thank you for this awesome products.
Can you consider adding a second M.2 2280 port for supporting a second nvme ssd
2 Likes
Might be hard to do because a new mainboard would be required! As well as possible PCIe concerns, not sure about the PCIe though! Otherwise would be nice! We do have expansion cards though!
2 Likes
It will depend on the PCIe lanes, the 11th gen mobile processors usually have 20 lanes, and 4 of those lanes are already taken up by 1 NVME SSD. My guess is that all the lanes are probably used, requiring an upgrade to the more powerful CPUs you find in an XPS 15/17 or Thinkpad X1 Extreme.
1 Like
While not an NVME SSD, you can get a 256gb or 1TB SSD expansion card. In this sense you can have up to 4 additional drives (if you wanted to sacrifice all ports and not be able to charge). Many people run their OSes off of the expansion card ssd, just as a point of reference.
When I was running Linux I was using mine with a 68gb partition as a swap, that I was hibernating Ubuntu to. Worked lovely.
1 Like
It might just be me but adding a second PCIE nvme would be a game changer. As i am a M.2 Egpu user and the performance a higher bandwith connection can provide will stop me from using tb.
I recently remembered this thread and, now that I have an account, I need to mention something I have been thinking about for a while now:
That being a 4-lane PCIe m.2 2280 adapter/riser that houses two 2-lane m.2 2230 slots.
(last I checked, such a thing sadly did not yet exist, though my google-fu wasn’t great as I kept getting results for desktop PCIe to m.2 adapters and/or m.2 to desktop PCIe adapters, and even sometimes m.2 to USB adapters - with growing capacities on m.2 2230 SSDs, apparently up to 2TB now, this seems like something that’d be more and more practical)
Other than maybe the height of fitting it under the keyboard (which could maybe be mitigated by making the adapter/riser itself double as a heatsink and therefore have the m.2 slots upside-down?), I do not see any limitation to doing this as PCIe lanes can be split up however you want as that’s how they work on a desktop motherboard after all (see also: desktop PCIe x16 cards that have four m.2 ports on them).
Heck this is even basically exactly what Microsoft is doing on the Xbox Series S/X consoles - they’ve simply taken the x4 PCIe gen4 lanes from its SOC and routed 2x lanes to the internal SSD and then 2x lanes to the storage expansion slot on the back of the console.
Additionally there were even some more budget-friendly m.2 SSDs that actually only use x2 PCIe lanes despite retaining the standard m.2 form-factor:
Lastly, since m.2 is just a different form-factor for PCIe, you can take advantage of the fact that you can plug PCIe devices into ports with fewer lanes and they’ll “just work” (because each lane is literally, not figuratively, just a copy of each other - an x16 slot is quite literally 16 individual x1 PCIe slots) which is important for anybody that’s ever tried running multiple GPUs - unless you were running an HEDT motherboard, you almost always had to plug one GPU into an x8 slot.
Oh and in terms of performance, because PCIe gen4 is twice the speed of PCIe gen3, that means 2 lanes of gen4 would be equivalent to 4 lanes of gen3, and getting the performance of a high-end gen3 SSD is nothing to scoff at (of course, if you were running both SSDs in RAID, then you’d still be getting the performance of a single 4-lane gen4 SSD).
EDIT: Oh and in terms of the surface area required to fit two 2230 SSDs onto a theoretical 2280 adapter card, one nifty idea I had is to have the m.2 slots for the 2230 SSDs on opposite ends of the adapter card with both 2230 SSDs pointing towards the middle of the adapter card. From there you would then simply use one single screw (or other screw-less retention mechanism) located directly in-between both 2230 SSDs to hold both of them in place.
…though, since you’d still need a second screw to hold in the actual 2280 adapter card, I guess you could also just have one of the 2230 SSDs use the same screw that holds in the actual 2280 adapter card while the other 2230 SSD uses that aforemented first screw located somewhere near the middle of the adapter card, but that’s less fun. 
2 Likes
Does the on-board m.2 port support PCIe bifurcation?
Technically if Framework give that port 4 lanes we can split it into 2x of 2 lanes (or even if it only have 2 lanes we can split it into 2x 1 lane) and hook up two drives like that
Alterlatively we can step back and have a PCIe SATA controller and just hook up numerous SATA drives from there.