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From a cursory glance, it looks like your mobo does support PCIe bifurcation, so my suggestion to use a cheap passive bifurcation riser card to run 2x NVME drives from one of the PCIe slots will work.
You’ll need to set the mobo to run each of the x16 slots at x8 (this won’t affect your GPU performance much), then enable ‘2x x4’ mode on the other slot to bifurcate it into 2.
I use Samsung PM9A3 datacentre drives in our storage servers; good bang for buck (3.84TB for £400). Make sure you use U.2 formfactor drives instead of M.2 though: better performance and cooling.
ectoplasmosis-
Thanks for all this. Presume this is going to be a bios bit of fiddling. I'll read up on it now I know the big words at least.
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Just looking at this again slightly more seriously - is there a reason to get 2 x 4TB rather than 1 x 8TB other than cost?
Would this actually work (albeit with some but not a life changing hit on performance) if I plugged it in and made some bios changes to the mobo? Feels like getting a single thing is less to go wrong than having 2 things plugged into another thing...
https://www.awd-it.co.uk/components/solid-state-drives-ssd/gen4/corsair-mp600-pro-nh-8tb-ssd-gen-4-nvme-m-2-solid-state-drive-cssd-f8000gbmp600pnh.html?Klarna and just getting it tomorrow is highly appealing.
CYOA
This one:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550-VISION-D-rev-10#kf
Is that Corsair a cheap consumer drive? Doesn't feel like it at nearly a grand. But perhaps the 8TB premium inflates it.
That's a concern - I've had a lot of crashes recently - whole computer shuts down and won't reboot unless I disconnect from power for 30 odd sec. Only happens playing PUBG. Haven't been able to diagnose. But certainly wouldn't want contents vanishing..