It is already an incredibly good laptop. Clearly beats the (more expensive) Lenovo TP I have. 
Posting this just in case someone else encounters it:
I installed the Dual M.2 expansion and installed two SN850X disks in it, and initially it showed a link speed of “8GT/s (downgraded)” for both drives in lspci. When I was tightening down the interposer, I thought I might have tightened it down a little bit too much, so I removed and reinstalled it, this time just making it a little snug. It still showed 8GT/s after this… So I tried again, this time also blowing off both the interposer and pads with a blower, and made it a bit more snug this time (though not as tight as the first time), and now both drives are showing as 16GT/s.
So, it appears that the interposer is a bit finicky with how tight it needs to be to get the full PCIe 4 speed out of it; otherwise it drops down to PCIe 3 speeds.
Edit: Upon further investigation it appears that this was due to the pcie dynamic link power management setting in bios.
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It’s Frameworks policy not to raise false hopes by announcing products before their actual release. The other way is to do it like Josh_Cook. Now you can debate with yourself, which way you prefer…
And about doing nothing for a year after release… how’d you know what’s been going on at Framework Inc. behind the curtains?
Product development does take its time. Remember, when LTT showed us the now released Dual M.2 Adapters months ago? After that, they went into testing and issues came up, that led to a BIOS update, and so on.
As frustrating that might be for customers, it’s still better than annoucing a product and then having trouble to follow up with it, due to whatever circumstances.
Remember the waves of anger swapping the community and ppl ragequitting whenever Framework announced any further delays for the Laptop 16 release?
And roadmaps are practically nothing else but a chain of product announcements, leading to the same issues I just described. I think Framework deserves more respect for doing things the professional way.
Framework did announce, that they would follow up with hard- and software updates, and so they did, even though, for various reasons that mostly haven’t been disclosed to us, they took their sweet time.
And I have no reason to believe, that they wouldn’t follow up with their promises in the future.
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So, I ended up getting mine last week and pretty much immediately started using it.
For some background, I really wanted a laptop with at least two full-size NVMe slots in it so that I could run two drives in RAID; while the 16 does come with two slots one of them is 2230, so it was close but not quite. I had considered using one of those M.2 extension/relocator boards (like this) to move the expansion bay myself, but those generally only work at PCIe 3.0 speeds and can be finicky.
So, the 16 got shelved for a while and I ended up with a Tongfang laptop which fit the bill, but still wasn’t quite happy with it as it only had a single Thunderbolt/USB 4 port and actually used more power at idle than the framework. There were other issues as well but I don’t want this to turn into a Tongfang review so I’ll move on.
When I originally got the 16 I was relatively happy with it; I was Batch 2 and got one with all the bells and whistles, getting both the GPU and regular expansion shell, extra input modules, etc… However, the GPU wasn’t really that much of an advantage for me for a 16 vs 13 inch laptop as I’ll typically use an eGPU if I wanted more power than a regular laptop had, and I’m not really a “gamer” and therefore having that extra GPU power on the go doesn’t really make much sense for me. So, what some would consider advantages quickly became annoyances for me, and I could really justify carrying around this big heavy laptop.
So… it got shelved, and I went back to using one of my Framework 13’s for a bit and then the Tongfang laptop when I found it.
When the LTT video came out showing the expansion board, I was still using the 16, and gave me some excitement about giving the 16 a feature that no other laptop had, making it justifiable to use over a smaller laptop. I had expected that, given that Linus is an investor and that Framework never makes announcements until things are ready to go, that it was somehow something official and that it was going to be released relatively soon. I then started checking the store several times a day waiting for it to show up so that I could place an order, ensuring I got my hands on one if it became immensely popular.
But the days went on without it showing up, and those days turned into weeks which turned into months. That LTT video went live on June 6th, and it was finally released on December 16th, slightly more than 6 months later. This is a timeframe I might expect from Kickstarter, not from an organization that supposedly has their stuff together especially when the final product was already being produced.
Alas, it is here now and all I can say is that, at least for me, this expansion bay makes this thing blow every other machine you can possibly get out of the water, assuming you want massive amounts of storage and don’t need a dedicated gpu (or are okay with using an eGPU when you need one). The only laptop that is potentially similar or better is the MSI Titan 18 HX, which has 3 full size NVME slots (with one being PCIe 5 even) along with 4 DDR5 slots allowing up to a massive 192GB of RAM. But that thing is an absolute beast both size wise and the size of the hole it’s going to put into your wallet.
My storage configuration now looks like the following: 3x 8TB SN850X, and a 2TB SN770M. Two of the SN850X’s, specifically the two in the expansion bay, are in RAID1 and are the primary disks. The remaining SN850X is used to store stuff I don’t really need redundancy for, like virtual machine images and whatnot. The SN770M has a completely different installation on it that I can use for testing things before I muck with my primary installation or do things like watch YouTube videos when I might not be in complete control over my environment.
I also have a few 1TB expansion modules that I could use but I don’t have a need for them at the moment.
So, to wrap this up, while I’m disappointed that it took this long for this board to get released, I’m happy that it’s here and that I get to use my 16 again, and that I have a reason to continue using it. Thanks for the continued great work and hopefully y’all get get to the point soon where BIOS updates aren’t holding things up.
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Just for clarity. The 850x plugged into the external bay m.2 slot. Is it getting pcie gen 3 or gen 4 speeds?
The Dual M.2 Adapter supports two M.2 M-key devices in 2230, 2242, 2260, and 2280 sizes with full 4-lane PCIe 4.0 throughput to each.
From Framework Blog: Framework | Our first new Framework Laptop 16 Expansion Bay module!
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All of the NVMe drives, including the two in the new expansion bay, are running at PCIe Gen 4 speeds (16GT/s) and have 4 lanes each, verified with lspci in Linux.
I initially was seeing PCIe Gen 3 speeds (8GT/s) but it ended up being because I was on battery and had some PCIe power saving option enabled in the BIOS; I forget the exact name but it’s like the 2nd or 3rd option in the advanced tab. Turned that off and now everything is running at PCIe Gen 4 all the time.
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