Hi all, first post on the Level1 forums here. Just seemed like the perfect place to ask this sort of question.
I recently set up a home server with hardware leftover from my old gaming build. The motherboard is a Z390 I Aorus Pro Wifi ITX board. I already had both M.2 slots on the board populated with M.2 NVMe drives. I’m only using integrated graphics since this is a server, so I decided to throw an ASUS Hyper M.2 card into the single available PCIE 3.0 x16 slot, to give me more NVMe storage.
I initially assumed this would work, as my BIOS does show support for x8/x4/x4 PCIE Bifurcation. So I only purchased three more SSDs instead of four, as I did not have the option for x4/x4/x4/x4.
Unfortunately, even with x8/x4/x4 Bifurcation enabled, only two of the three drives in the Hyper M.2 expansion card are showing up in the BIOS. Am I correct in assuming that I’m simply out of PCIE lanes at this point? The only other thing I can think of is that one of my brand new SSDs may be DOA, but I think that’s less likely.
Assuming the Z390 chipset and i9 9900 are my limit here - does anyone have suggestions for a newer Mini-ITX board that would allow me to do x4/x4/x4/x4 bifurcation? I’d love to be able to have 2 NVMe drives on the board itself + four more in the Hyper M.2