I have 3 x spare oculink ports on my MB, and with Unraid getting away from USB drives, I thought what better than to use a 32GB DOM on my MB. Seems like oculink should power the drive, so look to me like a neat solution.... If it actually existed.

Any experience with this ? Any well known vendors out there ? I can't seem to find anything....

No well-known vendors make them because it's technically impossible.

Oculink doesn't supply power, so an 'Oculink DOM' cannot exist.

Stick to a reliable internal USB header if you want a clean boot setup.

Innodisk produces the OCuLinkDOM 3ME2, a DRAM-less NVMe Disk on Module (DOM) designed for PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 connectivity via the OCuLink interface

I appreciate what you say above, but I found this device that seems to do the trick. Rare as hens teeth, and perhaps too niche for my use case. I wonder about the usefulness of oculink. Seems to be gaining hardware momentum, but few peripherals follow. Just my observation.

I'm impressed that you tracked down the Innodisk OCuLinkDOM 3ME2 at all.

I had no idea this thing exists.

You're spot on that it would indeed work as a clean, cable-free boot device in theory -- and from the specs, it almost certainly would in practice too.

The module is a purpose-built PCIe Gen3 x2 NVMe DOM with its own low-power draw pulled straight from the OCuLink connector.

Your Asrock Rack Z690D4U already supports Gen3 x2 natively, so it should plug in and boot Unraid just like a regular DOM would.

That said, even with it working in theory and potentially practice, I'd still argue why bother?

USB DOM devices are rock-solid, take up zero PCIe lanes or OCuLink ports.

You'd be trading a widely-available, perfectly reliable internal USB DOM for a rare EOL part that offers no real performance or reliability edge.

If it were me, I'd pass on hunting down a used one and just stick with the USB DOM route.

Cleaner, cheaper, and zero slot waste.

Edited June 6Jun 6 by Lolight