HP NL36 Microserver - PCI-e Bifurcation (Yes, it's enterprise you cheeky person!)

Be gentle it’s my first thread here…

So I have an old HP NL36 Microserver i’d like to use as a home for some older storage and offsite backup, ideally throw some old NVMe drives in along with some SATA hd’s

The issue is no bios option to bifurcate the 16x PCIe slot, the questions are:

Anyway to force bifurcation in the linux kernel?

anyone seen a low profile 16x to 4x4x4x4x m.2 card with a PLX?

why are the nice Gen10+ microservers so damn expensive!? :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m almost positive there is no way to force pcie bifurcation outside of bios support. I believe the gen10 was the first to support this in bios.
A card with a switching ic (plx) is your best bet… but it’s totally overkill for the horsepower available on the gen7, that and there wouldn’t be enough networking speed to take advantage of it.

I’ve got a soft spot for the gen7’s, they were the last microserver to have a 5.25" bay in them and they can fit an lto drive which is much longer than an optical drive.
I’ve got an nl40 I ordered coming to me this thursday.

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It’s a hardware feature/limitation, not BIOS.

The AMD Athlon II Neo cpu can barely saturate SATA let alone NVME so you’re wasting your money here in that regard.

The Gen10+ servers never really took off and they’re using 8th gen Intel Coffee Lake CPUs which are very old and not something you’d want due to vulnerabilities and the rather taxing mitigations.

Unless you need a small form factor and if you live in US Dell Precision 3650 Tower Workstation are a good deal for Intel 11th gen ECC capable hardware that doesn’t break the bank.

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not too worried about speed on this one, would be nice to just dump data off to the NVMe drives and then cron a job to move it off to the sata drives in the background, minimise drive spin-up.

shame they did not use a standard ITX board :frowning:

PCIE bifurcation support has been in most cpu hardware since atleast the intel core days. The issue is bios support for bifurcation, that is what is holding any given platform back.

There’s an extra sata port for the 5.25" bay (assuming you aren’t already using it) you could plug a sata ssd into it to enjoy fast speeds (limited to sata 2) without sacrificing one of the 3.5" bays.

it is nice that it has 2 usable pcie slots though, an ITX would’ve only had 1.

It’s still a hardware feature/limitation
See [Motherboard] Compatibility of PCIE bifurcation between Hyper M.2 series Cards and Add-On Graphic Cards | Official Support | ASUS USA for example of if you want to look deeper into it

Cheeky Person?

I just bought cheekywanker.org a few months ago.

We didnt really need to know that, thank you :rofl:. I will think of your fun domain when I buy my own in the future

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obviously they were cheekily slipping that website plug in

So apparently adding pcie bifurcation support into a bios is quite complex, there are only a couple of supermicro x10 boards that had no bifurc support from the factory that the community has added bifurc support to in a modded bios.
All the modded bioses for the gen7 only focus on adding sata port multiplier support.

I thought I would report back with some of the observations of the NL40 I got now that setup is fresh in my mind:

  • If the hard-to-find chipset drivers are not installed, driving traffic through more than one of the sata ports at the same time for any sustained period will cause the southbridge sata ports to drop out and become unusable until a reboot has occurred. This happened on all the modern windows, didn’t test linux.

  • There exists an IPMI card made just for the gen7 and it does work as expected, virtual kvm is java only.

  • The thermal paste used at the factory was quality and did not need replacing

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