I purchased one of these devices recently and can’t get any of the storage devices to work/show up.
I have the following motherboard, the ASUS Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi
The card is slotted into the PCIe second slot below the GPU.
I’ve tried using both AUTO and GEN4 speeds for the slot but can’t seem to locate any bifurcation settings just the option to use AUTO speed or manual speed adjustments.
I’m using Windows 11 Pro and device manager does show the NVMe storage controller but disk management isn’t showing either 2 TB SSD installed on the card.
Also tested the Gigabyte Storage Manager app and it doesn’t even seem to see the card as nothing is showing up.
Could this be an issue with compatibility or a faulty device ?
EDIT: Just confirmed I have the latest firmware installed on the motherboard, REV 805 dated 11/15/2022
I think I figured it out, the BIOS ONLY has bi-furcations settings for the first x16 slot that the GPU occupies.
Not sure I want to try swapping them around now.
I moved the NVMe SSD’s to the extra on-board M.2 slots and forced the speed on both to Gen4 to match the storage devices and they are detecting and working so far.
I was hoping to use a nice fan-cooled 4 slot expansion card instead but hey there you go.
I will now review my older Threadripper board to see if it supports bi-furcation on the second x16 slot or not and then try out the card there.
Unfortunately no, it does not → there is not enought bandwith for that.
You can:
use pcie_1 @ x16 PCIE 5 and not use pcie_2
use pcie_1 @ x8 PCIE5 and use pcie_2 @ x4 PCIE5
Additional restrictions apply if you use board M_slots, one of them is also shared with cpu lines. Refer to manual for detailed description.
I naively bought identical adaptor card from Asus, thinking I can consolidate all my m_2 driver to second x16 pcie3 slot on my desktop, but ugly truths of consumer platforms and manufactures marketing tricks.
There is nice support document breaking down what platform restrictions apply on expansion M_2 card from asus here, compare HEDT vs consumer and behold the fuckery there for all to be seen.
Relevant points and observations:
no consumer platform has enough pcie lines to directly connect more than x16 slot to cpu
they like to pretend though, like strix above. My older board (Z390 - top of the line) has 3 x16 PCIE slots, but second and third is connected via chipset and each is bandwidth limited to only x4 pice line each.
generally only first slot is usable for addin cards at full performance, and its only one supporting bifurcation at all
AMD PCI5 boards for some reason support only X8X8 bifurcation on PCI5 slots. You therefore can run at maximu 2 drives of the m.2 addin card and waste the rest of the bandwith
pcie line allocation is set by design and NOT reconfigurable on runtime → read manual carefully before buying
shitton of interfaces share the same links and there is not enough badwidth to use them simulatenously → ie. populating certain combination of interfaces disables other interfaces. Those that can be populated simultaneously do not have enough badwith to run simultaneously at full speed.
PCIE5 on consumer platforms is therefore waste of many at this point, since it bring additional restrictions and not usablke feature. First time ever I think. I will be buying asus prime X670 instead to save money and buy better cpu.
TLDR - its a clusterfuck.
If we want to use more than one x16 slot withou limitations, we have to buy threadripper or HEDT intel.