I am hoping for quick response here as my server is down as I just realized something about my Intel Z590 LGA 1200 ATX motherboards setup (attached image).

TL:DR at the bottom, but I feel these details matter.

I bought a prebuilt rig mainly for the Nvidia GTX 1080 it came with to use for Plex transcoding. This is also my first real server build and experience with Linux, Cache pools, arrays, parity's etc. A long ways from my many years of running a Windows OS (7, then 10, then 11) on a striped raid, hosting my Plex for many years. I knew a striped raid was a ticking timebomb, so I wanted a genuine NAS and settled on Unraid as I new I wanted a great product with good support for a n00b like me. I knew th rig purchased that was to be my new hardware already came with a "500GB SSD" boot drive (Currently running Windows ) and wanted that for running a cache pool. At the time I wasn't aware that it was actually a NVMe drive. NVMe is very new to me and I am learning it's benefits over traditional SSD's more each time I dig into my server setup/config. But I quicky realized the brand PNY was known for failures and I also had no parity/backup cache. So I bought 2 new 500GB Crucial CT500P3PSSD8's, one for my new Cache pool, and one for a protected/backup (per Space Invaders setup video). At this time I was only assuming my motherboard only had one slot for a NVMe, so I bought a PCIe adapter (see attached image)and setup my new Crucial drive , after a careful mover operation from my old PNY Cache drive, to my array data drive, then back to the new 500GB Crucial drive, the plan was to then replace the old PNY drive with the 2nd Crucial drive in the "onboard" NVMe slot. That time being right now. So as my server is shut down and I am removing the cover for what I think is the existing PNY 500Gb NVMe drive, I find it's was an empty slot. After some head scratching, I see another smaller cover just about my new PCIe adapter holding my new Crucial drive. I remove it to find where the existing (now empty and formatted) PNY NVMe drive was the whole time. So in otherwards, I have 2 onboard NVMe slots, not one like I previously thought. Naturally I'd like to just use them both. What all needs to be done to take the cache pool running on a PCIe adapter plugged into my MB, to just run it in one of the two onboard NVMe slots?

TL:DR can I just take my exiting 500GB NVMe currently married to my motherboard using a PCIe adapter, and move it to one of the two (I just realized I have) and it will read just fine, or will I have to change the configuration of how it's connected to my system now?

Edited June 30, 20251 yr by SmirkAction

It should just be seen as if nothing has changed.

if the pcie lanes are connected properly and signalling cleanly it should "just work", regardless of the adaptors or connectors in between.

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

It should just be seen as if nothing has changed.

Unfortunately it's not being recognized as part of my pool and if I try to mount it it warns me that it will erase it. So I just rebooted in Maintenance mode thinking I could manually mount it, but the options is now gone. I did mount the second drive, not sure if I should have or if it matters.

1 hour ago, SmirkAction said:

Unfortunately it's not being recognized as part of my pool and if I try to mount it it warns me that it will erase it. So I just rebooted in Maintenance mode thinking I could manually mount it, but the options is now gone. I did mount the second drive, not sure if I should have or if it matters.

I think I figured this out. I found a tip that said if a MB supports 2 NVMe slots, one might be disabled by default. So I ended up putting it back the way I had it with one NVMe drive onusing the PCIe adapter, and the other in the original location of the PNY drive that came with my rig that I replaced with a Crucial.

Now all I need to do is figure out the best way to use my 2nd Crucial drive as a protected/backup of my original that is mainly used for Appdata/Docker config files and high speed read/write for my Arr usenet apps.

Edited July 2, 20251 yr by SmirkAction

9 hours ago, SmirkAction said:

I think I figured tis out. I found a tip that said if you MB supports 2 NVMe slots, one might be disabled by default.

You need to read the manual for your particular mobo to see if some slots get disabled in certain conditions and whether that applies. You never gave an exact mobo model.

10 hours ago, SmirkAction said:

I did mount the second drive, not sure if I should have or if it matters.

No you should not have. If it boots and is seen then all is well, if it's not seen you stop there, you don't want to do anything else.

10 hours ago, Kilrah said:

You need to read the manual for your particular mobo to see if some slots get disabled in certain conditions and whether that applies. You never gave an exact mobo model.

I'm past that. I have it working and will mark this solved. Thank you for the response. How I have it, is both Crucial drives are placed, differently, one in the original PNY location and one in the PCIe adapter. I have them running in a zfs pool on a mirrored raid. I had no protection before on my cache pool, so it was a long overdue for an update. I may use that 2nd NMVe slot on my MB in the future, but onest ly if I added another SSD it for be just a standard SATA,.

But with that said, I did ask a follow up question for step two of this issue if you care to read, or chime in.

Thank you.

Question 2:

14 hours ago, Kilrah said:

You need to read the manual for your particular mobo to see if some slots get disabled in certain conditions and whether that applies. You never gave an exact mobo model.

14 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Not like it matters not, but noticed you said I never a listed my mobo model. Sorry, I thought this was it 'Intel Z590 LGA 1200 ATX' that I listed at the beginning of my post. But that was taken off the mobo's home page. My server was off at the time, I couldn't get the specs from my dashboard.

From my dashboard:

Model:	Custom
M/B:	ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG STRIX Z590-E GAMING WIFI Version Rev 1.xx s/n 210382440000535
BIOS:	American Megatrends Inc. Version 1903 Dated 08/30/2023
CPU:	11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz
HVM:	Not Available
IOMMU:	Enabled
Cache:	L1 Cache: 288 KiB, L1 Cache: 192 KiB, L2 Cache: 3 MiB, L3 Cache: 12 MiB
Memory:	16 GiB DDR4 (max. installable capacity 64 GiB)
Network:	bond0: fault-tolerance (active-backup), mtu 1500
Kernel:	Linux 6.12.24-Unraid x86_64
OpenSSL:	3.5.0
Uptime:	9 hours, 24 minutes

Edited July 2, 20251 yr by SmirkAction

That board has 4 m.2 slots and they should all work with NVMe drives.