Born2Slow Posted February 26 Share Posted February 26 Hello everyone! I'm new to Unraid, and basically everything homelab, so please forgive my ignorance. I tried to do as much of my own research before posting! I wanted to convert my old PC that was gathering dust (specs to follow) into something useful and found that Unraid is good way to do just that. My intention is to use it as a simple Plex server for use only on my home network for now. My motherboard has 6 SATA ports and ideally I would like to use 1 for parity and 5 for storage, which I'll populate with either WD Red's or Seagate Ironwolf's. To avoid using one of the 5 storage ports for the cache drive I've been looking into using an M.2 expansion card. This is where I'm running into a lot of confusion. My motherboard does not have M.2 slots and as far as I can tell from reading the manual and digging through the BIOS it does not support Bifurcation. I think this means standard (and super cost effective) cards, such as this one, will not work and I'll have to use something like this instead. To make matters more confusing I'm reading that both cards also require the motherboard to support NVME over PCIe. I can't find anything speaking to a feature like that in any of my motherboard's documentation. Am I SOL? If anyone has any insight that would help me I would really appreciate it. If an M.2 expansion card is not possible than I'll sacrifice one storage port for a SATA SSD. Specs: CPU: i7-2600k Mobo: Asus P8H77-M Ram: G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 CL9 4x4GB GPU: EVGA GTX 1060 3GB Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 PSU: Corsair RM750 80+ Gold USB boot stick: SanDisk 16GB USB 2.0 Thanks in advance for any advice! Quote Link to comment
Solution JorgeB Posted February 27 Solution Share Posted February 27 10 hours ago, Born2Slow said: such as this one, will not work This should work fine for a single m.2 device in a PCIe slot, top and/or bottom x16 slots, if want more then one in the top slot, bottom slot in only x4 electrically, then you'll need an adapter like the second model you mention Quote Link to comment
Born2Slow Posted February 27 Author Share Posted February 27 9 hours ago, JorgeB said: This should work fine for a single m.2 device in a PCIe slot, top and/or bottom x16 slots, if want more then one in the top slot, bottom slot in only x4 electrically, then you'll need an adapter like the second model you mention I'm fine with just one, I don't intend to run a parity drive for cache. I ordered the cheap one and I'll update this thread after I try it. Thanks for the quick reply! Quote Link to comment
Born2Slow Posted March 2 Author Share Posted March 2 Can confirm, this one worked without any changes made in the BIOS. It wasn't recognized in the BIOS but Unraid could see it so that's all that matters. Thanks for your help @JorgeB Hopefully this helps someone else new to NAS with old hardware! 1 Quote Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.