M2 drives, PCI lanes and SATA ports.
Hi there. So, I am planning a dual boot Hack along the lines of this build and had a question about M2 drives. I've been delving through the gigabyte forums but everyone seems to have a different opinion. If I run Win in the top M2 and OSX in the bottom (both PCI SSD's) I lose SATA ports 0, 4 and 5. This I can handle. With PCIx4 set to PCH the GPU still has the full 16 lanes but I'm trying to figure out what I have left for PCI cards. Is it just 4 lanes shared across the x8, x4, two x1's and the M2's. As the M2's are each different OS they'll only be running one at a time so not so much of a bandwidth issue but I wonder if there are still knock ons to do with addressing.
Basically I need to be confident that I can get away with 2x PCI M2's, Fenvi wifi, MOTU PCIe424 (connected to 2 x 24IO boards), Genenric Firewire 400/800 card connected to Fireface 400. They're all x1 cards and the MOTU won't be running at the same time as the fireface. If the TB3 > 2 > 1 conversion works I can scrap the generic firewire card. Don't want to bank on that though. In terms of what will be operational at any given time I think 3 lanes to the active M2 would allow full speed operation but that leaves 1 lane shared across audio, FW and wifi/bluetooth. Having written all this down it doesn't seem like a lot, I've crammed a lot more into a board before but NVME is new to me and I don't want to shoot myself in the foot before I begin.
Many thanks,
Jim