Need Help updating my BIOS (Supermicro)

[bonamin]

Hello everyone. Hope you're doing great !
I've got a "problem" that I am affraid to try and solve myself and I was wondering if someone could help me out !
 

The problem: 
I think I need to update my BIOS, but not only did I get confused by Supermicro's website, but also many articles I read online, said a LOT of things about bricked motherboards, and honestly, I'm too scared to ruin my machine. The process, isn't exactly what I'd call straight-forward. 
My Motherboard, is the Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+. 

Some people update though CLI during boot, some people through IPMI, etc. I'm seriously affraid to ruin a perfectly good machine.

Why update in the first place? 

I currently have a single Cache Disk (a SATA SSD), but for security reasons, I'd like to upgrade to 2 NVMe drives in RAID 1.
As far as I know, this is possible, and a good way to be protected. For know, I have to settle for backups of the Appdata folder.
That being said, my Motherboard doesn't support NVMe drives since it doesn't have any M.2 slots, so I will have to use PCIe to M.2 adapters. 
I saw one from ASUS, called "Hyper M.2 X16 Card v2". It supports up to four M.2 drives, but in order for it to work, (as I read here on the forum) my Motherboard needs to suport PCIe bifurcation so it's treated as 4, PCIe x4 instead of a single x16.
As this post on reddit suggests, this does actually work on X9DRxxxx motherboards, but with newer versions of the BIOS. 

Any other possible suggestions ? 

If someone has some other suggestion, instead of using 2 drives, I'd love to hear it. Or any other suggestion in general.
As you must have figured out by now, what I'm looking for, is a fast Cache, but with security in case it fails. 
Maybe the Single drive + Backup option is good enough. I don't know. 

 

Maybe, I could use two different PCIe to M.2 adapters, but I hate to ruin a whole slot, for a single drive. 
If I have no option though, well..

To Conclude:
If ANYONE of you knows what I need, I'd be more than happy to listen to what you have to say/suggest. 

If you require more info from my side, tell me. 


Hope I didn't bore you to death.  
Looking forward to your replies. Thanks. ❤️ 

[samsausages]

I was sweating the update because of the warning message as well.  I just made sure that I"m using the correct version and updated it using the BMC interface. (IPMI) But I'm on an H12 and the IPMI is a bit different.

M.2 is fast, but really depends on what you do if you will notice a difference vs using SATA ssd's.  Especially if on a 1g network, just copying files.
Maybe if you do a lot of read/write intensive on the server itself.
I was running a number of SATA SSD's and changed to U.2 and M.2, with many times the throughput.  But I don't notice much difference day to day, unless I'm extracting huge files locally and really hitting the I/O.  Or copying files from one SSD pool to another SSD pool.
You won't notice much difference over ethernet.  If you have 10g, your writes may be 500mb and reads saturate the 10g.  And that's with 2 SATA SSD's that can saturate SATA at about 550MB. ha

If your budget allows it, look at U.2 enterprise drives like the Intel DC P4510.  U.2 drives will vastly outperform the m.2 long term and they are pretty much bulletproof drives.  I'd rather run used DC P4510's in U.2 than an equivalent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive.

Edited May 7, 2023 by samsausages