Hi! This is my first message at Tom. 
I have an older rack server (Cisco UCS M200 M2) and I want to add 4 NVMe drives to it on a PCIe card. The common ones (at least the cheap ones) today seem to basically plug the drive to a 16x PCI under this so called x4/x4/x4/x4 configuration.
I've read that if my computer does not support bifurcation it will only see the first drive and not the other 3. But that is just the Bios, not the EFI Booter or Windows. So I guess the question is whether the rest of the drives become visible to the boot loader and the OS even if they are not supported by the Bios?
What I'm thinking is splitting each drive into 2 partitions, a smaller partition of 200MB and a larger one with the rest. Then I would define the first small partition as EFI system partition with a boot loader, bunch the rest of the small partitions as Swap and then bunch the larger ones as Raid 0 for the OS and data and run Windows 10 on that.
Is this possible or do I HAVE TO get a more expensive card with PLX controllers?
PS
A word on my computer for the nerds
My PC is a pet project where I converted a Cisco UCS M200 M2 rack computer into a PC. It's only 1U in height so I had to buy a PCIe riser module from another model and attack it with a hack-saw to make it fit. Then I added an NVIDIA 19xx video card onto it and attacked the lid of the chassis with a hack-saw to be able to close it. Then I added a USB card because it only has 2 USB ports.
It has 12 memory modules with 200GB of RAM running on 6 data buses. It also has 2 CPUs with 6 cores and 2 threads totaling in 24 virtual processors. It also has a Raid card with 4x1TB drives which are currently causing ALOT of Hardware Faults slowing down my monster.
It is also LOUD as heck! :/
Regards,
Þorsteinn Sigurðsson
I have an older rack server (Cisco UCS M200 M2) and I want to add 4 NVMe drives to it on a PCIe card. The common ones (at least the cheap ones) today seem to basically plug the drive to a 16x PCI under this so called x4/x4/x4/x4 configuration.
I've read that if my computer does not support bifurcation it will only see the first drive and not the other 3. But that is just the Bios, not the EFI Booter or Windows. So I guess the question is whether the rest of the drives become visible to the boot loader and the OS even if they are not supported by the Bios?
What I'm thinking is splitting each drive into 2 partitions, a smaller partition of 200MB and a larger one with the rest. Then I would define the first small partition as EFI system partition with a boot loader, bunch the rest of the small partitions as Swap and then bunch the larger ones as Raid 0 for the OS and data and run Windows 10 on that.
Is this possible or do I HAVE TO get a more expensive card with PLX controllers?
PS
A word on my computer for the nerds
My PC is a pet project where I converted a Cisco UCS M200 M2 rack computer into a PC. It's only 1U in height so I had to buy a PCIe riser module from another model and attack it with a hack-saw to make it fit. Then I added an NVIDIA 19xx video card onto it and attacked the lid of the chassis with a hack-saw to be able to close it. Then I added a USB card because it only has 2 USB ports.
It has 12 memory modules with 200GB of RAM running on 6 data buses. It also has 2 CPUs with 6 cores and 2 threads totaling in 24 virtual processors. It also has a Raid card with 4x1TB drives which are currently causing ALOT of Hardware Faults slowing down my monster.
It is also LOUD as heck! :/
Regards,
Þorsteinn Sigurðsson
Last edited:
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