NVMe cache drive on old motherboard

[Mex]

Hello,

I just discovered the marvel that is unRaid, and this is my first post. Apologies in advance if this has been answered before, difficult to find among so many threads.

 

I currently have unRaid running on a fairly recent Skylake machine (B150 + i3 6100) and I have it set up with a NVMe cache drive and six regular HDDs (one of those as parity).

 

Being a bit of a geek I recently ordered a Supermicro X8DTL-i board with dual Xeon E5645 cpus. This board obviously doesn't support booting of a NVMe drive, but I was wondering if it would still show up in unRaid, and still be usable as a cache disk if I used a PCIe adapter to connect the drive to the motherboard.

 

Furthermore, if it is detected by unRaid would it be possible to use it in a VM? 

 

Thanks for any clarification on this!

[david279]

See if the nvme controller is in its own group in the system devices

[JorgeB]

2 hours ago, Mex said:

This board obviously doesn't support booting of a NVMe drive, but I was wondering if it would still show up in unRaid, and still be usable as a cache disk if I used a PCIe adapter to connect the drive to the motherboard.

Yes, and it can be used in a VM for example to to store a vdisk, but if you intend to pass it thought see above.

[Mex]

Awesome, thanks for the replies! Makes me a little bit more confident that the transfer of drives from the Skylake system will go as planned.