PC Peripherals [Need advice] PCI-E bifurcation card with m.2 ports

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AmeyaVS

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Hello,

I need some advice I have placed an order for Lenovo P330 which has an internal PCI-E x8 slot.
I was thinking about buying PCI-E m.2 mounting cards available on Amazon to add additional m.2 storage to the systems.
But I soon found out that it needs BIOS support for PCI-E birfucation support, which after searching online a bit about the system seems like it doesn't have it.
Does anyone have experience with PCI-E bifurcation card, and any preference/experience one can share?

Any recommendations to go about acquiring possible such cards, and any pitfalls of using them?

Thanks in advance.
Ameya
 
The only downside is cost. They use PLX chips which are specialised and low volume making them expensive to implement. The last time I checked, it was around $200 +shipping/customs for a x16 to x4x4x4x4 bifurcation card.

All of Gigabyte's B550 motherboards can bifurcate x16 to x4x4x4x4, in fact B550 has more bifurcation support than X570 across brands and models. This is the cheapest way to get bifurcation support in a system, but it's an entire platform change.
 
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Is there some card available on Amazon/Flipkart which has the support, as I currently don't have an option to change the platform?
As for using the wifi slot, I want an integrated solution. I want to avoid devices hanging loose without any support within/external to the systems, as I currently don't have the necessary tools to create temporary mounts etc for the m.2 pcie reiser.
Thanks @rsaeon , @ibose, @burntwingzZz for your suggestions, I will check and see if I can find something locally.
 
 
@rsaeon and or any other member who own

B550M PRO-VDH WIFI / B550M DS3H AC or any other cheap board with onboard wifi- bifurcation support.​


The idea is to pass wifi to open wrt vm and wired nic to proxmox
AmeyaVS said:
I tried ordering something from Aliexpress, it doesn't allow one to complete the order currently, even if items are added to the cart.
Click to expand...
alibaba does allow it but high customs almost 3k final price shipping fee on it was 6 dollar after reaching delhi again 1100 on customs so 3k in the end

payment method was sbi global debit card
also on lookout for Asus EX-A320M-GAMING .It has all the right amount of PCIE ports for Home Server /router/FW etc
 
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burntwingzZz said:
@rsaeon and or any other member who own

B550M PRO-VDH WIFI / B550M DS3H AC or any other cheap board with onboard wifi- bifurcation support.​


The idea is to pass wifi to open wrt vm and wired nic to proxmox

alibaba does allow it but high customs almost 3k final price shipping fee on it was 6 dollar after reaching delhi again 1100 on customs so 3k in the end

payment method was sbi global debit card
Click to expand...
I tried ordering this device which seems to support the PCI-E bifurcation: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000034598072.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.1.20755ec4y4fIaT&algo_pvid=0159cbff-44db-40d2-bbd0-54675d5cdaac&algo_exp_id=0159cbff-44db-40d2-bbd0-54675d5cdaac-0&pdp_npi=4@dis!INR!15346.32!15346.32!!!178.00!!@2103247117021978458275995e3a2e!10000000078841321!sea!IN!2914211654!AB&curPageLogUid=lO99PIofgElF
, but I could not complete the payment.
And was giving an error due to restrictions it cannot complete the order.
Will have to wait and see, If I can get something equivalent to work with.

Also, as the restriction apply I cannot change the system to AMD based one at this point in time, so I will need to work with the existing configuration.
 
order from alibaba ,only one SSD will be detected if motherboard doesnt have bifurcation support

www.alibaba.com

Nvme Ssd Expansion Card Nvme Pcie Raid Adapter 4 Ports Nvme Ssd To Pci-e 4.0 X16 Expansion Card - Buy Raid Ssd pcie To Nvme nvme Raid Product on Alibaba.com

Nvme Ssd Expansion Card Nvme Pcie Raid Adapter 4 Ports Nvme Ssd To Pci-e 4.0 X16 Expansion Card - Buy Raid Ssd pcie To Nvme nvme Raid Product on Alibaba.com
www.alibaba.com www.alibaba.com

they will require aadhar for verification and finally you might be spending around 3k
 
AmeyaVS said:
Is there some card available on Amazon/Flipkart which has the support, as I currently don't have an option to change the platform?

As for using the wifi slot, I want an integrated solution. I want to avoid devices hanging loose without any support within/external to the systems, as I currently don't have the necessary tools to create temporary mounts etc for the m.2 pcie reiser.
Click to expand...

Since it's an Intel platform, consider USB. The P330 has two 5Gbps ports and two 10Gbps ports in the rear (along with 5Gbps in the front). USB has matured greatly in recent years to where I'm comfortably running USB network cards and USB storage devices as a long term solution in my proxmox clusters.

You can also stick the usb NVMe enclosures pretty securely using the dark grey mounting tape, by 3M and others so that it remains as a single unit without anything dangling:


I used that same tape to come up with this ancient contraption from seven years ago:

pogoplug_pro-01.jpeg

Randomly, the Pogoplugs are still in daily use, it's crazy awesome. More about them here:

PogoPlug Pro - Discussion Thread

^ Ok. Will try that.
techenclave.com techenclave.com

If you're looking for more ideas/information about the P330, this is pretty thorough:

www.servethehome.com

Lenovo ThinkStation P330 Tiny Review

In our Lenovo ThinkStation P330 Tiny review, we see how this small Intel and NVIDIA Quadro powered 1L workstation performs
www.servethehome.com www.servethehome.com
 
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rsaeon said:
Since it's an Intel platform, consider USB. The P330 has two 5Gbps ports and two 10Gbps ports in the rear (along with 5Gbps in the front). USB has matured greatly in recent years to where I'm comfortably running USB network cards and USB storage devices as a long term solution in my proxmox clusters.

You can also stick the usb NVMe enclosures pretty securely using the dark grey mounting tape, by 3M and others so that it remains as a single unit without anything dangling:


I used that same tape to come up with this ancient contraption from seven years ago:

View attachment 185012

Randomly, the Pogoplugs are still in daily use, it's crazy awesome. More about them here:

PogoPlug Pro - Discussion Thread

^ Ok. Will try that.
techenclave.com techenclave.com

If you're looking for more ideas/information about the P330, this is pretty thorough:

www.servethehome.com

Lenovo ThinkStation P330 Tiny Review

In our Lenovo ThinkStation P330 Tiny review, we see how this small Intel and NVIDIA Quadro powered 1L workstation performs
www.servethehome.com www.servethehome.com
Click to expand...

Any enclosure for nvme that can really reach 10gbps?
 
jayanttyagi said:
Any enclosure for nvme that can really reach 10gbps?
Click to expand...

I found this review on Amazon:


Screen Shot 2023-12-10 at 7.53.56 PM.png

The estimated 1280Mbps doesn't include overhead so it looks like a good fit.

From wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org

USB 3.0 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The USB 3.1 specification includes the USB 2.0 specification while fully preserving its dedicated physical layer, architecture, and protocol in parallel. USB 3.1 specification defines the following operation modes:

USB 3.1 Gen 1 – marketed as SuperSpeed or SS, 5 Gbit/s signaling rate over 1 lane using 8b/10b encoding (nominal data rate: 500 MB/s); replaces USB 3.0.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 – new, marketed as SuperSpeed+ or SS+, 10 Gbit/s signaling rate over 1 lane using 128b/132b encoding (nominal data rate: 1212 MB/s).

The nominal data rate in bytes accounts for bit-encoding overhead.

The physical SuperSpeed bit rate is 5 Gbit/s. Since transmission of every byte takes 10 bit times, the raw data overhead is 20%, so the byte rate is 500 MB/s, not 625.

Similarly, for Gen 2 link the encoding is 128b/132b, so transmission of 16 bytes physically takes 16.5 bytes, or 3% overhead. Therefore, the new byte-rate is 128/132 * 10 Gbit/s = 9.697 Gbit/s = 1212 MB/s. In reality the Gen 2 operation mode has additional link management and protocol overhead, so the best-case achievable data rates are about 1100 MB/s.
Click to expand...

The numbers and calculations get confusing to me but the key point here is best case scenario is 1100MB/s.
 
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