PCIe V4.0 Speeds
x4: 7.877 GB/s
x8: 15.754 GB/s
Thunderbolt 4:
4 GB/s
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This is a little more of a wild suggestion, but any chance of an active switch PCI-E bay that can fan out a ton (4-8 ports) of downstream Oculink/M.2/U.2 storage from the Gen 4 x8 upstream port?
I know there’s a product like this by OWC called the Accelsior 8M2 that presumably uses a PCI-E switch to negotiate Gen3/4 to all the downstream storage and Gen 4 to pass to the host. Two oculink ports would be a good start to this but most dedicated storage systems have more than two drives for better redundancy options.
You could make a pretty killer DAS with at least four 4 U.2 drives and most enterprise U.2 can be powered directly off 12V 2A capable USB-C power bricks, very much in the same vein as the beefy USB-C supply that powers the Framework itself.
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Wouldn’t it make more sense to have this inside of some kind of dock?
I could see this make sense with an x8 port and maybe an additional m.2 inside the expansion bay, but otherwise I don’t see the point of putting the switch there.
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Looks like over 100 people went to the order page. Those 100 people will want to buy interposers soon - hopefully they will be available before the last batch gets out the door
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As @Christoph_Straten mentioned, this would be best place inside the end device rather than in this dock. Unfortunately, PCIe Switches have 0 focus in mobile solutions. There’s nothing out there (that I’m aware of) that you would want sitting in your laptop. Especially for PCIe Gen 4 and higher, even low port count switches are in the ~7W TDP area for the low end. In a small enclosure like a laptop that’s probably enough that you’re going to need both a heatsink and fan to deal with it. And it’s going to be sitting there chewing up that power in the laptop. It would have a massive effect on battery life and likely and up making it so you’d need to remove it any time you wanted to be away from your dock. Putting it in the end device lets it be responsible for its constant power draw and heat load, which is much better dealt with in a stationary object vs. a portable one.
The other issue is that since Avago (Broadcom) purchased PLX, both them, and Microsemi have almost entirely pulled out of the consumer / prosumer market for PCIe switches. Who remembers the old SLi boards with the built in PLX PCIe Switch to provide Quad SLi PCIe x16 lanes on a baord? Now these are almost exclusively used in Enterprise systems and the quantity agreements etc. make it fairly prohibitive for a low volume product using pcie switches. It’s going to cost a couple hundred dollars to get even a handful of the smallest PCIe switches in hand.
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Really interested in your work (already used your link for the 8x version lol), will this Oculink 4x + m2 SSD still have a usb 2.0 port and/or a DisplayPort ? I’m curious :]
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Yep, it will be identical to the 8x model except for the M.2 M key and Oculink connector
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Amazing, and the pcb sounds really great. I have a couple of questions just to confirm please, also for community:
- As I understand, the 4x + M.2 version would support 63Gps PCIe 4.0 x4 Oculink speed, correct? So this would be half of the bandwith that FW16 allows (x8 PCIe Gen 4), and the other half would be used for the M.2 slot. For the 8x oculink version, I understand it would be double the speed (i.e. everything the FW16 has to offer, a blistering fast oculink cable provided), correct?
I assume these are the speeds and this would be perfect for me - I will likely end up buying both XD. The reason is that currently I am using the one dock v2 as mentioned which only supports 4x oculink in any case. And I would literally buy the other one as well for future proofing (down the line, when people have insane 8x oculink EGPUs and 5090s).
- If you have any recommendation on this, could you please recommend a good oculink cable? I am asking as I have seen in many other fora that signal integrity issues also stem often from poor/wrong cable choices. Recommendation from the creator would be really useful.
Finally, I would be really interested which EGPUs / oculink cables everyone is planning to use (especially for the x8 oculink version). Would love to have links, if possible on Western purchasing sites. Thanks a lot!
PS: please correct me if I am wrong, this is more of a question than anything else…
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Yep.
As of right now, I don’t have anything to use OcuLink so this testing will likely be crowdsourced. You can probably find out what cables people used for non-FW-related setups and that would be your best bet.
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Does anyone have a good suggestion for an oculink Dock? I’m looking for something I can use in my studio, where I’m running an old Motu card(proprietary regular pcie card) to connect to some motu interfaces(essentially a DAC with 48 input Channels)
In other words I’m looking for something that has more than one regular pcie slot so that I can run a gpu and the proprietary DAC card over it. I have a power supply left over.
I could then use the fw16 as my main studio machine. Walk in, plug in oculink and be ready to go.
Sorry, maybe too much info. Just trying to to find the right dock for my usecase and thought maybe someone already has some experience with oculink docs.
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The link seems to be broken on my side 
Fixed.
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You sure are fast !
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I was already fixing a different stripe issue with no payment confirmation emails being sent out.
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Only about 10% of those people actually would’ve bought one.
Is that why I didnt get an email about my purchase? I was worried I didnt type my email in correctly.
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Nope, I hadn’t set up receipts sent to the email provided after purchase, just sent you a receipt though.
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Appreciated man, I just used auto fill and was wirried a space or something messed it up
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Nice work! Is there a possibility down the line to get it open source and open hardware?
I am aware that you have some costs to cover and want to make a profit of all your hard work.
Thats fine and totally ok but i am afraid when you start neglecting selling it. All the knowledge and your work would vanish into the ether with the need of another person starting from scratch designing a new one.
TL;DR: if you feel like you wont have time to support or sell it anymore, could you provide framework or us with your design to further develop it?
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