I have a T7610 with an LSI megaraid with three hard disks 1 T. Gives me a read/write of about 600MB/s
I want to add a PCIe card with 4 M.2 modules. Am looking at the Asus Hyper. Does anyone know if there are compatibility issues?
As I understand it the Precision T7610 does not have bifurcation on the motherboard and also has issues booting from a M.2 NVMe SSD. There are workarounds for both these issues, although they involve special HW, money and/or time.
Bifurcation on the motherboard is required to use the less expensive 4 M.2 slot add-in cards like the Asus Hyper. Basically with bifurcation you can go into the motherboard BIOS and "PCIe lane assign" a x16 slot into (4) x4 devices. This allows a less expensive 4 M.2 add-in card like the Asus Hyper to simply run each set of (4) x4 lanes straight to the M.2 slots.
Without bifurcation on the motherboard you need a M.2 add-in card with a PCIe lane switch chip to manage the traffic between the 4 M.2 devices and the motherboard. These aren't cheap. Some hardware M.2 RAID cards also effectively have this functionally. Again, not cheap.
I put together a list of quad M.2 add-in cards with "PCIe bifurcation on the card", both with pure PCIe switches and RAID on this forum here.
Techgee
2 Intern
•
623 Posts
1
October 23rd, 2019 13:00
As I understand it the Precision T7610 does not have bifurcation on the motherboard and also has issues booting from a M.2 NVMe SSD. There are workarounds for both these issues, although they involve special HW, money and/or time.
Bifurcation on the motherboard is required to use the less expensive 4 M.2 slot add-in cards like the Asus Hyper. Basically with bifurcation you can go into the motherboard BIOS and "PCIe lane assign" a x16 slot into (4) x4 devices. This allows a less expensive 4 M.2 add-in card like the Asus Hyper to simply run each set of (4) x4 lanes straight to the M.2 slots.
Without bifurcation on the motherboard you need a M.2 add-in card with a PCIe lane switch chip to manage the traffic between the 4 M.2 devices and the motherboard. These aren't cheap. Some hardware M.2 RAID cards also effectively have this functionally. Again, not cheap.
I put together a list of quad M.2 add-in cards with "PCIe bifurcation on the card", both with pure PCIe switches and RAID on this forum here.
Pstambo
2 Posts
0
October 23rd, 2019 23:00
Thanks Techgee for this.