![]() ![]() This isn’t merely an anecdotal observation: it’s a deliberate part of the spec. In other words, you can shove a card into the slot while Windows is running, and it should simply start working. This comes with a caveat, but let’s start with the good bit: PCI Express is hot-pluggable. You don’t need to turn off your PC to exchange PCI Express cards If you suspect a graphics card or other device isn’t running as smoothly as it should, investigate whether that PCI-E slot is really what it appears to be, or a low-speed impostor. Rather than offering slots in the x4 and x8 formats, manufacturers sometimes provide x16-sized slots that only support x4 or x8 connections. This, too, will work, but the limited bandwidth could cause operational issues. Indeed, some motherboards offer open-ended slots, allowing you to insert (say) an x8 card into an x4 slot. ![]() If your motherboard doesn’t have the right slot, you can just use a larger one. The same applies to PCI-E x4 and x8 cards, such as USB expansion cards or hard disk controllers. What you might not realise is that PCI-E does work the other way round – so an x1 card will slot happily into an x16 socket and work perfectly well. This complicates the PCI Express standard: a PCI-E card that’s designed for an x16 slot won’t physically fit into an x1 or x4 receptacle. There are also standard sizes for x4 and x8 variants. These are referred to as PCI-E x1 connectors, while the full-sized slots are called PCI-E x16. The shortest 25mm slots are identical from a software point of view, but have only 18 contacts and support only a single data lane. A full-length 89mm slot can support the fastest data rates, by aggregating together 16 “data lanes” using 82 electrical contacts between the card and socket. Slot size correlates with speed… well, mostlyĪlmost all motherboards offer a mixture of long and short PCI-E slots. You can, alternatively, install a brand-new PCI-E 4.0 card into a computer from 15 years ago, and it’ll work without a murmur – although the slower slot will prevent it from operating at its full capacity. You can plug a PCI-E 1.0 card in a PCI-E 4.0 slot without any tweaks. The really impressive part is that, through them all, PCI-E (or PCIe) has retained full forward and backward compatibility. These generational leaps have underpinned two decades of performance improvements right across computing technology. We’re now seeing PCI-E 4.0 systems that push the throughput up to 31.5GB/sec. Three years later came PCI-E 3.0, which made use of a new encoding system to nearly double the effective top speed again, from 8GB/sec to 15.75GB/sec. But the people wanted more: in 2007, the cross-industry PCI-SIG (“Special Interest Group”) introduced the PCI-E 2.0 standard, which doubled the top speed to 8GB/sec in each direction. The first PCI Express interface was a big hit, quickly supplanting PCI-X in both consumer and server hardware. PCI Express has phenomenal cross-generation capability With its new architecture, the PCI Express 1.0 interface was able to support bidirectional data transfers at up to 4GB/sec, around four times as fast as the PCI-X hardware that was common at the time. Anker USB to SATA Converter Adapter Cable ($21.This is because, although a serial connection might not transfer so many bits per cycle as a parallel one, it can often reliably run at much higher frequencies (hard disks were going through a similar transition at around this time, moving from the parallel IDE standard to Serial ATA, or SATA for short). You have a SATA controlled component that you need to connect somewhere (since it has USB on the other end and this can be converted to virtually anything, you are home free.” – Amazon customer reviewĪvailable here. You want to minimize the space all or your drives take up in storage (does so by alleviating the need for cases) You need to be able to quickly switch drives You hate buying a new drive case every time you get a new drive You operate a server which has 2.5″ drives and you need to troubleshoot drives ![]() You need to get 1 file off of a drive occasionally (a drive which usually remains in storage) It comes with an ON/OFF switch for protecting HDDs. It also comes with a manual and CD with the driver. Supports drives with a capacity of up to 4TB. Comes with a light which indicates data transfer.
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