Hello everyone, I am the proud owner of an HL8 Pre Build. So far, everything works fine. Unfortunately, there are two weaknesses that I wanted to fix with a PCI card from Synology. Weakness 1: no 10 Gig ethernet Weakness 2: no space for M.2 NVME. Both would be solved by the E10M20-T1 from Synology. Unfortunately, I now have to realize that the PCIe card is not recognized at all (in the BIOS). Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this? It should not be due to bifurcation.
Alternatives might be the “Pro Max” build described here;
Or, you might be able to get a simple 4 slot m.2 bifurcated carrier card, set the PCIe slot to x8x4x4 and put an m.2-to-10 Gbe adapter in one of the m.2 slots. I’m not 100% sure that bypasses the root cause, but I think it does in that there would be one less device on the PCIe bus (the switch) and all 16 PCIe lanes would be available on the edge connector. Or, more technically 12 of the 16 lanes available through the bifurcation. You still can’t do x4x4x4x4, so you do lose one of the four m.2 slots.
Yes, I also stumbled upon the article. However, I did not for a second think this could be the case, so I obviously did not explicitly search for it beforehand. Now I already have the E10M20. I also somehow can’t believe that for whatever reason the APU or the motherboard doesn’t recognize the PCI card.
I’m still hoping there is some solution to get the E10 card working. Maybe someone from the forum or the 45Team has an idea.
Yes, the carrier card solution would probably be alternative 2. Although I’m not really confident about it anymore. In the end, it might not work for some reasons again…
P.S. I don’t think there’s an x8x8x4 bifurcation. The motherboard itself only supports x8x4x4 and x8x8. So, I would either have to buy a x4x4x4x4 adapter card and lose a slot, or I would have to get an x8x4x4 card from Aliexpress.
The 5000-series APUs seem to have some odd behavior when bifurcating or switching the x16 PCIe slot. This is discussed in various other threads across the internet. Unfortunately, AMD has not commented on or documented the source or nature of the behavior.
1 Like
I saw somewhere that it sometimes seams to help with 10gig cards if you tape certain pcie lanes on the pci card. I give that a try on the weekend 
And thx a bunch for the support by the way!
1 Like
You could try updating the motherboard BIOS if you hadn’t tried that already, but my hopes would be low.
Also, QNAP makes a similar card. It sounds like you can’t return the Synology card, or don’t want to sell it used, but a similar QNAP card (2.5G instead of 10G) did seem to work with the HL8:
B&H is the only retailer for The QNAP network/MVMe expansion cards I’ve seen that doesn’t price gouge. Here’s a link to the 10G version;
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1688430-REG/qnap_qm2_2p10g1tb_qm2_series_2_x.html
FWIW, the QNAP card has worked very well in my HL8 since I installed it. No issues to report.
2 Likes
So, little update from my side:
Didnt get the Synology card to work.
Tried the Qnap QM2-2P10G1TB next. Here at least the m.2 Nvme gets recognised but no luck on the Ethernet port…
Does the HL8 come with Rocky Linux 8 or 9? I think 9 should have driver support but 8 may not.
Does the NIC not show up at all, or is there some issue accessing it? What does the UI or the appropriate NIC interrogation commands show?
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-list-network-cards-command/
Doesnt show at all not even in the bios. Am using Truenas as OS.
1 Like