ASMedia's ASM2824 has a PCIe 3.0 x8 upstream port as well as four PCIe 3.0 x4 downstream ports. The switch is designed primarily for storage devices, enabling installation of four NVMe drives on a single card. SI-PEX40129 card uses ASM2824 PCIe switches and therefore does not rely on PCIe bifurcation supported by CPU or PCH (i.e., they will work on closed end systems that have limited PCIe bifurcation capabilities) as well as on software RAID technologies supported by the platform. Dedicated PCIe 3.0 x16 bus bandwidth fully maximizes NVMe SSDs performance. Delivers unprecedented fast transfer speed via intelligently aggregated Dual x16 PCIe 3.0 bus bandwidth. NVMe RAID is supported base on the motherboard chipsets.

The I/O CREST SI-PEX40129 is a great accelerated secondary storage solution for any workstation with true PCIe 3.0 x8 bandwidth (x16 Interface). It has two M.2 NVMe ports to accept two NVMe M.2 SSDs, so each NVMe M.2 SSD has dedicated PCIe 3.0 x4 bus bandwidth. It delivers transfer speeds 20 times faster than SATA SSDs. By by-passing the traditional PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe solutions, using the SI-PEX40129 will allow user add 2 M.2 NVMe into any non-Bifurcation PCIe x16 slot to achieve their full potential with a bandwidth of up to 6,500 MB/s. Unlike onboard DMI 3.0 based NVMe solutions or Single NVMe PCI-e x4, which are forced to share a single PCIe 3.0 x4 lane with the motherboard's data ports, the SI-PEX40129 combines 2- M.2 drives to be able to run on PCIe 3.0 x16 lane. This unique architecture allows the drive to interface directly with the platform's CPU, which provides PCIe x4 bandwidth for each NVMe SSD!