Channels vs Lanes

[idata]

I'm considering purchasing your 750 series ssd 1.2TB but I'm a little fuzzy about the architecture. I have an Asus Sabretooth X99 MB and your 5960 CPU so I have 40 PCIe lanes to work with, correct? Right now I'm running two GeForce 980Ti's in SLI. If I add your 750 series NVMe SSD (18 channels) do I need to remove one of these 980Ti's (16 lanes) to get the best performance out of the SSD? I'm unclear about how many PCIe lanes I need to free up to get the best performance. I'm thinking channels and lanes are the same thing?? Can you advise?

[jbenavides]

Hello Jim1989,

The http://ark.intel.com/products/series/79678/Intel-SSD-750-Series Intel® SSD 750 Series uses a PCIe* NVMe* 3.0 x4 interface, so it will reach its best performance in a PCIe Gen 3.0 slot with 4 lanes (x4).

Doing a quick check of thehttps://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_X99/specifications/ Asus* Sabertooth X99 Specifications, your motherboard uses this setup with a 40-Lane CPU:

3 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x16, x16/x16, x16/x16/x8)

You might want to double check with http://www.asus.com/us/support/ Asus Support, however, it seems you would have room for two x16 cards (Video cards), and in the 3rd slot, you will have x8 capability. This would be fine since the 750 only requires four lanes (x4).

The mention of 18 channels in some online websites refers to the capabilities of the controller handling the NAND flash memory of the drive, this is an internal feature of the SSD and is not related to PCIe* lanes.