Hey y’all, I bought a x4x4x4x4 4 slots M.2 PCIe card foolishly thinking that if it fits in the slot, it would surely work. In the end, I got 2 of the 4 SSDs working on my old AM4 X470 chipset. I’m coming to you for advice what the cheapest way to get to use this would be. I’ve noticed that a lot of CPUs have a PCIe lane limitation of 28, just short of what I need (I’d like to run the SSDs but also a x16 GPU). I’m not too keen to buy a threadripper setup for this occasion…
Cheers!
I’m not sure what hardware you’re running, but with my motherboard, to get 4x4x4x4 out of a slot requires sacrificing GPU bandwidth from x16 to x8
to get 4x NVMe drives out of a single PCIe slot without bifurcation you need a card that has it’s own RAID controller. These aren’t cheap (think ~$500) as they are specialty hardware, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a whole professional workstation or server.
You don’t necessarily need a raid controller, I think a pcie bridge or switch chip will work too. They’re still expensive but they’re significantly less than $500.
This sounds like a path I could take - just buying a mainboard like that and making it a NAS. Which board do you have there? If it’s AM4, I could get a similar one and just reuse my old CPU.
Does your adapter happen to have a PLX chip? Those are designed for this very specific use case. The adapter is designed to run on 8 lanes and the PLX chip handles the rest, so GPU in one slot and adapter (with PLX chip) in another slot, x8/x8 biggity bam. Right now you’re tryinf to run it x8 and those 8 lanes are just going straight to 2x M.2 as x4/x4, but PLX would divvy it all up essentially 4x M.2 at x2/x2/x2/x2, that kinda thing. If this adapter doesn’t have it and you can’t get this to work, and you’re willing to blow another hundred bucks, that other kind of adapter would def work.
Without knowing your motherboard I’d def download the manual and ctrl+f some promising keywords such as ‘bifurcation’ or ‘PCI’ and basically hunt for anything in the manual that describes settings to enable this. Sometimes on a 3 slot board the bottom ‘chipset’ slot can be toggled to run something different than PCH, like some other controller.
I’d also try running the adapter in every possible configuration, on the most current supported PCI-E standards and a previous generation if motherboard allows, ie: adapter top slot, GPU middle slot, GPU top slot, adapter 3rd slot (if mobo has one), disable PCI-E 4.0 or enable 3.0 each time just to see if some configuration works (kinda tedious but costs 0 dollars so why not)
as x4/x4, but PLX would divvy it all up essentially 4x M.2 at x2/x2/x2/x2, that kinda thing. If this adapter doesn’t have it and you can’t get this to work, and you’re willing to blow another hundred bucks, that other kind of adapter would def work.
Without knowing your motherboard I’d def download the manual and ctrl+f some promising keywords such as ‘bifurcation’ or ‘PCI’ and basically hunt for anything in the manual that describes settings to enable this. Sometimes on a 3 slot board the bottom ‘chipset’ slot can be toggled to run something different than PCH, like some other controller.
I’d also try running the adapter in every possible configuration, on the most current supported PCI-E standards and a previous generation if motherboard allows, ie: adapter top slot, GPU middle slot, GPU top slot, adapter 3rd slot (if mobo has one), disable PCI-E 4.0 or enable 3.0 each time just to see if some configuration works (kinda tedious but costs 0 dollars so
Thanks for the hints. I’ll try to put it in gen 3.0 mode and see if I get more settings there, good idea!
What’s the motherboard model? Which slot are you attempting to use? Is it a physical X16 slot with only a X8 connection? Do you have any other slots available for M.2 drives?
It’s a MSI X470 GAMING PRO. Tried both upper x16 slots. The second one seems to be x8, but the first one doesn’t work either despite being x16. I have other m.2 slots but they’re already used up - however those are smaller SSDs so worst case I could move my OS to a SATA drive and populate those m.2 slots with the larger and newer SSDs that i bought! 😂
if it fits in the slot, it would surely work
If you got something like the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 Card:
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-Expansion-Card/dp/B084HMHGSP
https://www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/accessories/hyper-m-2-x16-gen-4-card/
Then there are specific motherboards listed that support the bifurcation requirements.
Of course, if your x16 slot is taken up with this thing, you can no longer use the slot for a graphics card.
Perhaps the cheapest way forward would be to use your x16 slot for graphics, and distribute your 4 M.2 cards using multiple adapters in the smaller slots (if you have room for that). One of the adapters might need to be PCIe x1. Well, cheaper than Threadripper!
That’s precisely the SSD PCIe solution that I bought. ^^ Yeah, might have to redistribute… Thanks for letting me know about the compatibility listing, I wasn’t aware of it. I’ll check if I can get one of those second hand.
Edit: I’m slightly worried about ASUS as a mainboard supplier though because of their recent rootkit escapades…
