Alphacool Eisblock HDX-5 NGFF+SATAIII PCIe Card with passive cooling block - black

 

The Alphacool HDX-5 is a combination of a RAID controller card and a massive cooler. It has two slots for SATA M.2 SSDs and two additional SATA slots, allowing you to set up a RAID 0 or 1 group. The 4x PCIe card also provides a bandwidth of up to 3900 MB/s. 

 

With the Alphacool HDX-5, you get a RAID controller card together with a massive heatsink for your M.2 SATA SSD. The card also features two SATA connections on its end, for connecting your normal SATA drives. This lets you choose whether you just want to connect two M.2 SATA SSDs together for RAID 0 or 1, or if you want to connect one M.2 SSD to each hard drive in the SATA slots to make a RAID group, or just use two hard drives in the normal SATA slots. Alternatively, you could use just the two M.2 SATA slots in a RAID group and use the normal SATA slots for additional hard drives for your system. 

 

So that the connection to the rest of the system doesn’t become a bottleneck, Alphacool uses a 4x PCIe plug-in card that provides a bandwidth of around 3900 MB/s. That’s almost 600% more than a conventional SATA connection with around 640 MB/s. Even many motherboards only have a 2x PCIe for the M.2 slot, essentially half of the possible bandwidth of the Alphacool 4x PCIe card.

 

The HDX-5’s massive cooler prevents the M.2 SSDs from decreasing in speed, which generally happens very quickly during large data transfers due to overheating. When this happens, the SSD’s performance drops to around 10% of its actual capacity. With the HDX-5’s massive cooler, which covers the length of your entire SSD, this possibility is almost entirely eliminated. Unlike M.2 connections on a motherboard, which are hard to cool due to their positioning near or underneath the graphics card, the HDX-5 has no such problem.

 

There is a protective film covering the PCI-E plug contact. This must be removed before initial operation.