Now this is a pretty cool little gadget. You know how difficult it is to physically access your M.2 SSDs on your motherboard … the Icy Dock’s ToughArmor MB840M2P-B will allow you to Hot-Swap NVMe Drives with ease.
Taken from Tomshardware … Icy Dock’s latest gadget, the ToughArmor MB840M2P-B, is a great way to add an M.2 slot to an older system. But this model also adds another important feature that your motherboard probably doesn’t support: Hot-swapability. Provided your SSD supports it, this feature allows you to pop the M.2 SSD out while your system is still running, enabling true M.2-on-the-go capabilities.
Icy Dock’s expansion card converts four PCIe 3.0 lanes into an NVMe M.2 SSD bay and appears quite simple, but it has more features lurking underneath the surface than one would suspect. Icy Dock equipped it with a hot-swap design that allows you to pull out the M.2 drive in a jiffy and built the cage with a tool-less installation mechanism. The chassis is made of aluminum and comes with a thermal pad for cooling your M.2 drive. It even has a header to connect to the HDD activity LED in your PC case.
We’re not all lucky enough to afford the latest motherboards that come with their plethora of M.2 slots, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have any of the multiple gigabytes-per-second fun that modern NVMe SSDs have to offer.
PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSDs can easily push up to 3.5 GBps in read and write speeds nowadays, with entry-level M.2 drives pushing around 2 GBps at friendlier price points. Meanwhile, their SATA counterparts typically cap out at around 500 MBps throughput. This makes an upgrade to M.2 very interesting, especially if you’re into video editing or even if you just want your games to load faster.
To ensure compatibility with as many systems as possible, the ToughArmor MB840M2P-B comes with full-height and low-profile PCIe expansion slot covers, and the card slots into PCIe x4, x8 and x16 slots as needed.
Source: Tomshardware
