PC Master Race

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PCIe bifurcation (lemy.lol)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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.