A PCIe expansion card for an on order HL4

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I have a HL4 on order and plan to run unRAID on it. Can anyone recommend a M.2NVMe SSD (single disk) adapter? I understand, after talking with HomeLab the AOX-ALF3-2m2 adapter does not work because (even though the manual says it does) the motherboard does not support bifurcation. -Thanks in advance

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They’re pretty much a commodity. NVMe is based on PCIe, so little or no electronics are involved.

I’ve used this in the past;

But in the HL4 you probably want one with a slot bracket because of the way the case folds up with the motherboard on its side, eg;

Just be sure to get one that will run at PCIe 4.0 if you will have NVMe SSDs that are capable of greater than about 3,000-3500 MB/s.

Note, you can get multi-NVMe cards that don’t require bifurcation. QNAP makes a few different ones. They are more expensive, because they have mux logic chips (about $165 on B&H) and only run at PCIe 3.0. But they do exist if that is more in line with what you were trying to build.

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Very helpful. Thank you very much.

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I guess I gotta be that guy but wanted to point out that bifurcation is available but not x4x4x4x4 mode needed for that adapter.

Another recommendation if you want the option to expand further in the future is this NVME Split Expansion Card:

It was recently featured on Raid Owl’s youtube with the full build HL4’s. There’s some trade offs but it’ll allow using a half height x4 or x8 pcie card in the future. You can also see the bifurcation options in the BIOS around the 1:55 mark.

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I knew this had been discussed here before, but didn’t go confirming things since Paul said he spoke with 45HL support. So, another option (and maybe RaidOwl discusses alternatives in the vid, I didn’t watch) would be a commodity 4x Nvme card with the BIOS set to x8x4x4 and three of the NVMe’s would work, is that right?

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Yes - I would think that would work with the x8x4x4 setting. I’m not sure what would happen if you accidentally populated both slots shared on the first x8. I’m guessing only the first one will work but it could confuse the system. I suppose just don’t do that and you’ll be fine. :slight_smile: