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Tangentially related, but GPUs with embedded m2 drives mentioned in the article (IIUC they effectively pass m2 drives through to the system by using unused PCI lanes) are a very interesting idea for a low volume transcoding machine.

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It's a clever idea but unfortunately limited by the fact that it requires the motherboard to support PCIe slot bifurcation, which isn't very common on consumer boards. I assume the target market is OEM integrators who can go out of their way to pair it with a suitable motherboard.

My dirt cheap Asrock A320m-ITX and my mid-level Gigabyte Aorus Elite x570 support bifurcation, did the feature become much less common in the last couple years?

I think the situation is generally better on AMD platforms than Intel ones, but still YMMV.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/any-lga1700-motherboards-wit...

Some boards will only bifurcate the x16 slots into x8/x8 mode, which is sufficient for an x8 GPU with one SSD attached to the spare lanes, but that still leaves 4 lanes unutilized. Adding two SSDs to fill up the bus requires support for x8/x4/x4 mode, and an x16 carrier for four SSDs requires support for x4/x4/x4/x4 mode.

Well the cheaper one does lack the 4x/4x/4x/4x mode in the bios, wonder how much of that is a hardware limitation.

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