Solved: Working NVMe solution (Kioxia CM7-V (U.3) on OEM W790)

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Serialcables Gen5 adapter

link here

  1. C-Payne PCIe Gen5 adapter with cable

Link to cable
Link to card

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

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Glad you got everything working. I’m in the process of flashing this exact card to x8/x8. What steps did you take to get this done? Thank you