PCIe Bifurcation Frustration with Icy Dock ToughArmor NVMe and 3 PCs

In this video I try to test out the Icy Dock ToughArmor M.2 NVMe Mobile Rack for PCIe slots. It supports 2 removable NVMe drives placed in the included sleds, and (almost) fits an x8 or x16 lane PCIe slot that supports bifurcation to get 4 juicy lanes to each of the SSDs. I test it out with Samsung 990 Pro and Western Digital SN850X 4TB drives.

That being said, it turns out that not all bifurcation implementations are created equal, nor are all PCIe slots. Hence the frustrating aspect. Buy it with a generous return policy in place, if you buy it at all.

Just to be 100% clear: This is not sponsored in any way. If you couldn't tell from the length of the video and the conclusion. But anyways, I paid for it out of pocket and bought it for my own purposes.

Oh yeah, at the very end there's an update to my video on using the Dell EMC PowerEdge T640 as a backup "server" with 18x 20TB disks.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro and Unboxing
03:04 PCIe Bifurcation
04:35 Digression
06:40 The Card Itself
12:25 The SSDs
15:35 Installing SSDs in Trays
27:24 Testing in the T640
48:48 Testing with a generic micro-ITX
56:10 Testing with a generic mini-ITX
1:08:58 Performance testing the SSDs
1:15:21 Thermal measurements of the WD
1:20:23 Conclusion
1:25:17 Outro
1:26:33 Installing and measuring the T640