That's actually pretty cool, but why the 16x design, when there are only 8x lanes being used by it?
Also, with only space for two drives, you must really value this easy swap system since a 16x slot should be able to hold 4 drives. You'd be sacrificing 8x precious lanes for this privilege.
Also, I presume this requires bifurcation. I wish motherboard makers would be much clearer in their specs as to which slots support bifurcation.
Heck, I wish they were much clearer in documenting their PCIe expansion all together. Which sots work at the same time without degrading other slots, etc. This is generally so poorly documented (at least without digging into details in the manual, and even then can be unclear) that it makes buying a motherboard when you desire these features nearly impossible.
All of that said, I can't help but wonder who this is for.
HEDT is pretty much dead (having been replaced by true workstation products that suck at client workloads), and consumer CPU's have insufficient PCIe lanes to use something like this without unacceptably degrading the GPU down below 16x.
Maybe some user who really cares about having lots of m.2 storage, but is OK with running integrated graphics?
