Hyper 4X nvme RAID card only detecting 3 drives

[dj423]

Motherboard: Gigabyte B550m DS3h (Rev 1.3)
CPU: Ryzen 5 5600g
RAM: 32G DDR4
GPU: None
Raid card: Jeyi "Hyper 4X M.2 NVME PCIE"

So I am building a new NAS system with TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.0, and wanted to add in a 4x NVME RAID card with 4 512G nvme drives. I made sure the motherboard supported PCIE lane bifurcation, and it does. However, with all 4 drives installed the system only detects 3 drives. Is this normal? I am new to these fancy NVME raid cards, but I assumed it would detect all four drives. I have tried swapping out the drives with a different set of nvme drives, and I tested each of the 4 drives on the M.2 slots on the motherboard and all check out fine.

I went into the BIOS and selected the different bifurcation settings, but no joy. Only see's 3 of the 4 drives in the bios. The only other card in the system is an intel 520X-da2 10G NIC. I have also swapped out the Hyper RAID card with a replacement initially thinking the card was bad. Running out of ideas, so I thought I would post here in the event someone can school me on how these nvme add on cards work. If it helps the bios version is F15, and the system runs fine, with the exception of the 3 drive detection deal.

Thank you

 

[Ericloewe]

I made sure the motherboard supported PCIE lane bifurcation, and it does

Down to x4/x4/x4/x4? And does the CPU support that configuration? Because that's the real question, the motherboard is just a bunch of wires and firmware with the PCIe controller settings in this scenario.

I'm not 100% sure when it comes to Ryzen, but a quick web search reveals talk of G-model processors not supporting x4/x4/x4/x4 because of how the GPU is wired up.

There's also the matter of other PCIe devices on the board, without a block diagram for the board and a list of cards plugged in, we can only speculate.

 

[dj423]

Thanks for the reply Ericloewe. That may be it, I did see some chatter about the "g" chips using a lane for the graphics in my searches. In the bios it shows 2x8, 1x8, or 2x4, but no 4x4. So I may have an incompatible CPU with what I am trying to do. Thanks again

 

[ChrisRJ]

So I am building a new NAS system with TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.0, and wanted to add in a 4x NVME RAID card with 4 512G nvme drives.

RAID and ZFS are mutully exclusive, at least if you want your data to be safe. Here are more details:

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

 

[Ericloewe]

Since it's just a passive adapter, there's no hardware RAID going on here.

 

[dj423]

Since it's just a passive adapter, there's no hardware RAID going on here.

Exactly, I just needed to figure out a way to feed the pool all the drives, for a z-2 pool. I think these are just pcie to nvme 'riser' cards - fwiw. Marketed as 'raid'. Thanks for confirming. Learning this Ryzen stuff as I go. All I needed was an extra PCIe slot - and wound up building a new system, but I feel better running my storage on something that isn't 12 years old. :) Thanks