Multiple M.2 drives?

[Matt2012]

Depending when and how good the new Mac Studio Will be once Apple finally release it, I’m thinking of making it my main machine instead of my PC.
The only thing I can’t quite work out is the storage as don’t want to pay the Apple tax for more ssd storage, plus they don’t enough either.
Right now I have a 10gb NAS set up but pulling big files from it for video editing still isn’t quite as good/smooth as from my M.2 drives on my machine.
Aside from my main os drive, I have another x3 gen 4 8tb M.2 drives which fit direct into my motherboard which work great and are super fast.
Question is, if I took the x3 drives out of my pc, what is the best way of connecting them all to a Mac Studio and will the speeds still be just as fast? Is there some kind of device that can hold all the drives instead of having to connect them all separately?

 

[joevt]

I don't know how the M.2 drives are accessed in your PC motherboard. Do they have dedicated lanes to the CPU or are they connected to the south bridge and therefore limited by the bridge?

The Mac Studio will have Thunderbolt 5 ports (80 Gbps).

Your M.2 devices are PCIe gen 4 x4 (63 Gbps).

For best performance, each M.2 device should be connected to a separate Thunderbolt 5 port.

I don't think anyone makes a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure with better than PCIe gen 4 x4 connection but I don't think that's impossible. PCIe gen 4 x8 (126 Gbps) would be limited by the Thunderbolt speed (80 Gbps).

You might find Thunderbolt 5 enclosures that accept multiple M.2 devices. Each M.2 device might be limited by a PCIe gen 4 x1 or x2 connection though unless a PCIe switch is used.
I don't know if any such enclosures exist yet. There's the OWC ThunderBlade X12 but I don't know the internal layout or if you can swap out the NVMe devices.

 

[PaulD-UK]

@Matt2012 That's the use case for the Mac Pro, rather than the Studio, as it can be stuffed full of 8x NVMe PCIe 4 cards...

The problem with multiple SSDs connected to a single port is that currently TB4 doesn't allow enough bandwidth to connect more than one NVMe SSD per port.

So you will need TB5 to allow multi-NVMe enclosures to work properly at the speed of the blades.

But nobody is rushing to develop $1000++ enclosures when only the M4 Pro Mac minis and Pro/Max MBPs can work with them.

Give it a year or two, and the way forward will be clear, but at the moment the only way to aggregate three PCIe 4 NVMe blades on one port it to buy something like the Sonnettech Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock, have one inside it and hang a further two or three TB4/5 NVMe enclosures off the three downstream TB5 ports.

That way all of the blades will get the best share of the PCIe 4x4 bandwidth available from a single port with current technology.