Background
For about half a year I’ve been troubleshooting my HP Z4 G5 desktop and the Kioxia CM7-V drives which I couldn’t get to work.
Solutions that were tried were:
- Direct to HP SFF i8 with an SFF i8 cable was tried with no luck. The NVMe port 0 is supports Gen4 and is supposed to give native access.
- Serialcables Gen5 adapter
- C-Payne PCIe Gen5 adapter with cable
Solution
First of all a big thanks to Wendell for helping out with the problem.
In the end the solution was to get the C-Payne host adapter which allows you to set the bifurcation via a simple UEFI bootable tool. One flash and setting the BIOS settings to 4x4x4x4 and the system came alive with no further troubleshooting.
I can’t speak more highly of Christian and C-Payne. Even offering help and customer support on a Saturday afternoon.
In terms of value, customer support, build quality and features, my experience is that the C-Payne products are the better choice.
The SerialCables offering of 699$ per PCIe card will set you back 1400 for connecting two drives. On the other hand C-Payne’s host adapter will host 4 drives and a complete kit to run 4 drives will cost 425$, or 350$ if you opt to run two drives.
For a solution that works and offers the flexibility to change the settings on the card, it seems like a no-brainer in terms of cost vs. performance.
Haven’t gotten to benchmark the drives yet. But the simple benchmark in Linux vary between 11 to 15 GB/s