Hey guys, I am (as you may know) completely new to the world of Homelab so therefore have a question.
I ordered a 2-Slot M.2 NVMe Carrier Card when I purchased my fully built HL4. The two Nvme’s installed on it serve in Raid1 for Proxmox. But there is also one more Nvme on the motherboard. How can and what can I use this one for? I do not see this one under “Disks” in Proxmox. Or is it that this still has Houston OS on it now?
All help appreciated 
The single NVME on the motherboard most certainly is the one that came preinstalled with Rocky Linux and Houston. It would need to be wiped before Proxmox can use it but should show up with your other disks. Any chance you can get a screenshot for us?
Exactly what I thought but the disk is not visible in Proxmox. There I only see the two NVME on the card and the 4 HDDs that are for TrueNAS.
Interesting indeed. Maybe try lspci and lsblk from the command prompt and see if it shows up there. I’m guessing no but that would help us see if it’s proxmox UI not showing it or the OS doesn’t see it.
Something else to try. If you reboot and bring up the BIOS boot menu (usually F11 at boot), is the third NVME a boot option? Sometimes the BIOS setup screen (usually F2 or DEL at boot) will show drives. Might be another place to look.
Just spit balling here but, assuming the third NVME worked before you added the carrier card, I wonder if there isn’t enough PCIE lanes to go around and that onboard m.2 slot is now is disabled.
Hi Ryan,
Both lspci and lsblk don’t show the NVME on the motherboard. I think you might be right that that the onboard slot has been disabled. No problem but just something I did noit understand as a beginner
Thanks for your help!
If you’re good then I’m good. 
Personally, I’d still check the BIOS. I don’t see any reference to the second m.2 slot being disabled in the motherboard manual and only the one on the front side is direct PCIe. The m.2 on the back of the motherboard goes through the chipset.
If it is do to a shortage of PCIe lanes, looks like you could use bifurcation settings to cut the slot from x16 to x8. I doubt you’d loose any performance with a 2 NVME card. At best, the drives are Gen4x4 which means two drives would only need a total of 8 PCIe lanes.
I’m hesitant to poke my nose into this thread, since I don’t have the full build HL4/8, but are you actually sure both the two NVMe’s you see are the ones on the PCIe card? Did you order the HL4 with a 1TB OS drive? Is it possible the bifurcation setting for the PCIe card isn’t correct in the BIOS?
@rnaaijkens I take it you added the pcie carrier card yourself with two Kingston drives? Looking at the pictures you posted of your HL4, there isn’t a card installed I the x16 slot.
Also, since you have the HL4, you will have two available m.2 slots on the motherboard for drives. The HL8 uses one of those for the backplane but that wouldn’t apply to you. I’m thinking it’s possible that you’re seeing two drives on the motherboard and not any on the NVME card that you may have installed.
No, my bad. My search took me to the support page for the 1.2/1.3 version of the motherboard, and the manual for that isn’t the same as the one for the 1.0 version of the motherboard. I didn’t see your link before I posted, sorry.
It’s all good! I could have just as easily been taken to the wrong one.
I think I found it. I took a picture of the two newly purchased NVMEs and now see it by the serial numbers.
There are two NVMEs being used in Proxmox. The one on the motherboard and one of the two on the PCIe card. I’m going to take another look in the BIOS on a necessary reboot to see what I see there. For now I don’t need the extra NVMe so there is still time.
Super thanks for all the thinking and figuring out. Hopefully I didn’t cause you guys any extra work.
Got it! Makes sense now. I bet turning bifurcation will allow you to see the other. Most likely the “PCIe 4x4” option.
