I’m trying to set up a system with an asus hyper m.2 PCIe card with 4 1Tb ssds on it with an
asus pro ws x570-ace mother board and and a 3600x. I’d like to setup zfs mirrors on these 4 ssds.
I’ve updated to the board to latest bios and it only presents me with 2 options for the card ‘auto’ and NVMe raid neither of which causes the card to present the drives to the OS as individual block devices. I’ve tried the card in both 16x slots and the 8x slot and populating the different m.2 slots with various positions and numbers of drives in case it behaved any differently in any of these combinations but it always just shows up as a single 1Tb block device to the OS (I’m running manjaro 20.2.1 with kernel 5.10) .
Does anyone know of a way of manually setting one of the 16x slots to be 4x4x4x4 and making the card present the drives as individual devices?
Does your motherboard/bios support pcie bifurcation on the slot you’re using? Because that’s the only way to do it with a “dumb” card. The word should be in your motherboard manual if it’s there.
Otherwise you need a pcie switch card, and those start expensive and get worse.
edit
According to this you were doing the right thing
Were you able to get the Hyper M.2 card in slot 1 with four NVMe drives to be fully recognized? I am looking to do the same thing with an ASUS X-570-E Strix or ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero/Dark Hero/Formula motherboard. I saw the change to the Hyper M.2 card compatibility document implying it would now support four drives in slot 1.
In general you just need to check if the board you want supports PCIe bifurcation in the x16 slots you want to put the card in. It just needs to support x4x4x4x4 mode. Seems ASUS calls it PCIe RAID mode for some reason. The Strix seems to support only x4x4 in the second x16 slot which is only connected to x8 electrically. Seems to be true also for all the others except the Dark Hero, which seems to support x4x4x4x4 in the first slot.
I agree that the Strix only supports x4x4 in the second slot. However, the latest version of them compatibility document implies that the first slot in the Strix is now capable of supporting x4x4x4x4. I’m hoping that someone can confirm that this is true before I buy one.
Update on this for those who wanted to know if I got this working - No I didn’t. I gave it what I think is the best chance to work with the lastest firmware on the board and putting the expansion card in slot 1 but I never got more options in the bios to get it in 4x4x4x4x. I tried both the available options and neither presented them as individual devices to the OS. I didn’t have time to troubleshoot further.
Sorry to hear, I was in a similar situation to you last year.
I think few if any of the x570 boards will allow you to use a 4slot m.2 pci-e board.
I had the MSI PRESTIGE X570 Creation Motherboard and I couldn’t for the life of me get it to work, moved into slot1 (x16 pci-e) moved the GPU down to the x8 slot
I ended up going for a TRX40 Threadripper instead to have the extra resources.