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will a PCIe NVME adapter work?

  • S

    Hello,

    I picked up an older Dell Poweredge T410 server with the motherboard it came with.  It is running Xpenology OS, which is essentially Synology's Disk Station Manager OS that has been ported over to work on non-synology hardware.  I'm considering adding a PCIe to NVME drive card to add NVME drives.  I don't know if this older motherboard will support this or not.  Most likely the only one that will work is NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe X16/X8/X4 Card.  I believe the PCIe slots are only PCIe 2.0 and I don't think they support bifurcation.  Will any of your PCIe adapters work on this motherboard?  If so, which slots would support the adapter?  And if so, would the limited speed of PCIe 2.0 make the NVME drives no better than just getting a SATA expansion card to add more drives as far as throughput is concerned?  I am only looking to add 2 smaller drives hopefully in a RAID1 array using SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) to act as a cache drive. 

    Thank you,

    SpencerC

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  • 1

    PCIe 2.0 adapters generally do work in older servers like the T410, even without bifurcation support. The key is that most single-slot NVMe adapters use only one PCIe lane for the SSD itself, so bifurcation is not required. As for speed, PCIe 2.0 x4 gives you about 2 GB/s bandwidth, which is still significantly faster than SATA for cache workloads. For a RAID1 cache array with two smaller NVMe drives, that should be more than sufficient.

    Hardware tips at 1win.biz.pk

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  • 1

    Good question about PCIe 2.0 compatibility. From my experience, PCIe adapters still work fine on PCIe 2.0 slots — the bandwidth is halved vs PCIe 3.0, but for a RAID1 cache drive use case this is generally sufficient for most workloads.

    Hardware tips at 1win.biz.pk

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