Additional M.2 disk on a PCIe M.2 adapter on a B460M-A?

Chia Plotting
1

Hi,

2 of my plotter have the following config:

  • Intel i7-10700KF 8-cores / 16-threads
  • 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz
  • ASUS Prime B460M-A motherboard with 2 M.2 slots.
  • 2 x 1TB Corsair MP600 Force M.2 SSD configured in Raid 0
  • Storage HDD connected by USB3.

I’m getting ~2.6TB per day from these 2 machines with an average CPU and RAM usage of ~65%. This means that my main limitation is the amount of temp storage so I’d like to increase this.

I bought an additional 1TB Corsair MP600 Force M.2 SSD and a PCIe x4 M.2 adapter but I can’t get it to work, the additional disk isn’t recognized in the BIOS or by the OS. I don’t know much about all these PCI terms but my understanding after reading the motherboard’s manual is that the PCIe 16x port from this motherboard should work even if I’m using the M.2 ports on the motherboard. My understanding is that with some motherboards some PCI lanes are shared between the M.2 ports and the PCIe ones but it doesn’t seem to be the case here? I don’t really know what I’m talking about so sorry if it doesn’t fully make sense :slight_smile:

Does anyone know if it should work? It’s possible that I got a bad M.2 PCIe card or that the disk itself is bad (I need to test it in another machine, but I’m waiting to have another reason to turn down my plotter as it never fun to stop many plotting jobs).

Thanks!

2

One important note: If I connect a GPU to the PCIe port I’m getting some output (I use this when I want to access the BIOS), so I know that the PCIe port works, I just don’t know which speed is supported.

3

If you have an adapter, and plug the NVME into a x16, yes, it should work. Let me do a little more research and I’ll see what I can find out. Do you know what motherboard you have? Edit: (Disregard, I see the motherboard now)

4

Ok, have you went into disk management and attempt to assign the new disk a letter?

5

Thanks for your help!

I’m running Ubuntu Server 20.4, I’ve checked with fdisk but I don’t see the disk at all…

6

Regardless if your motherboard supports PCIE 4.0 or 3.0, or even 2.0 for that matter, if you plug hardware like an M.2 into it, it should recognize the NVME. I’m not a big Ubuntu user, so I can’t help with trouble shooting you with that. But the first thing I would do is change the card to a slot that you currently have a working card, and see if it recognizes it.

7

In another thread I saw someone mention making a bios change for the pci-e NVME adaptor to be recognized. Not sure if this applies here but might be something to check.

8

Thanks, I’ve looked for this but can’t find any option like this in the BIOS. On my other plotters I had to change the PCI lane configuration (to something like 4x/4x/4x/4x) but I don’t find this kind of option in my bios… Starting to suspect that it’s just a bad adapter… I’ll do more research in the forum to see if I can find the post you’re talking about!