Dual or quad NVMe SSDs on a PCIe x4 slot?

Hi. I have an old DQ77KB motherboard that I use as a NAS of sorts. I want to add some NVMe drives to it.

As you can see it only has a single PCIe x4 slot (EE). There is a PCIe Half-Mini x1 slot (DD) too, and a PCIe Full-Mini x1 slot (I) which currently has a SATA SSD in it (boot drive).

I don’t think the BIOS supports bifurcation, not that it really matters because I don’t think you can run NVMe drives on 2 PCIe lanes anyway.

Is there any way around this?

I am ignorant of the realities but my mind says a NVMe card with its own PCIe bridge on board should not need bifuraction support as the PC will se it as a single device with a chunk of storage on it.

Could be wrong though and I don’t know how common they are or if most are happy to make dumb pass through boards and let the CPU handle it.

The only device like that I have see is made by Startech and needs an x8 slot. It has a “switch” chip on it but I don’t know how it works. The manual says it needs an x8 slot though, it won’t work with fewer lanes.

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Why do you need/want two or four NVME SSDs in this motherboard?

SATA ssds will not bottleneck anything on this system, whether in M2 form factor or otherwise, your best option if you want to add SSD storage is almost definitely to get a HBA card to go in that interface then plug ssds into it.

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Mainly because there are deals on NVME SSDs that I wan to take advantage of, and for future proofing as I will eventually upgrade this NAS.

The other option is to just build a new NAS now, but I am having trouble finding suitable parts. I am cheap but want ECC RAM, decent performance and low power consumption.

Just in case this is still of relevance to anyone:

There are many no-name 4x4 NVMe adapter cards out there based on the ASM2812, which can supposedly utilize 4 or even fewer upstream PCIe lanes, and autoconfigures this on power-up. So if your board’s PCIex4 connector is open-ended and there are no obstructing devices on the PCB where the additional board pins would hang uselessly, one of those cards could potentially work without any physical modifications.

edit:
Here’s an AliExpress link to a 4x4 ASM2812 card I have, but have only just started playing with–this exact listing is out of stock, but there are many other sellers with this same card. There are also dual M.2 cards based on the same PCIe switch, I believe, but I have no experience with them.

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