Dell T7920 not seeing NVMe on 9460

[DenzelD]

Hi All. I'm hoping someone can help guide a bit of a newbie on NVMe PCIe cards.

I'm building a Dell T7920 from parts and I've put a "Dell NVMe SSD Adapter Card 4x M.2 PCI-E x16" into CPU1 Slot 7 and a "Megaraid 9460-16i" into CPU1 Slot 6.

In the BIOS the four drives in the PCIe card are being picked up by the VROC adapter, I don't have the upgrade key. However the Megaraid card is not seeing the NVMe drives at all. Am I doing something stupid?

Thanks all... any help our guidance greatly appreciated.

[frankr2994]

You won't see the nvme drives in raid configs because they aren't connected to that sas card.
If you set up whatever you plan on plugging into that sas card to jbod you can use software raid to connect everything together

[DenzelD]

Thanks so much for getting back to me. Do you know if there is any way of making the 4 nvme drives in the ultra speed card visible to the 9460-16i raid controller so i can do hardware raid?

Ive seen four mini sas ports on the back side of the system board in the 7920 labeled pcie0 and pcie1, and cpu1 pcie0,1. Would connecting one of those ports on the system board to one of the four ports on the 9460 be a way forward?

[frankr2994]

Those mini sas ports are for u.2 enablement which would be a different backplane in that system. And to the best of my knowledge there is no way to include pcie devices with a SAS card hardware raid.

May I ask why you want to use hardware raid?

[DenzelD]

Thanks again for the quick response and of course you can ask why. I'm hoping to use the machine with a Multi-OS boot configuration so I can pivot between Windows/Linux. If I configure the RAID inside the OS (which is a very viable option in a single OS setup) I wouldn't be able to dual boot of a RAID array of disks.

If i purchased the licence dongle for the VROC, do you think I'd be able to setup RAID on the pcie NVME storage? If I enable VMD I can see the four nvme modules in the VROC BIOS settings.

[frankr2994]

I would look into running a hypervisor instead of multi boot. @stormsonweathers is a big fan of proxmox.
I can't answer about vroc.

[stormsonweathers]

Was just reading through the message, but VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) is still software RAID at the end of the day, so it's no different than using a software RAID focused OS like proxmox or TrueNAS or even StorageSpaces on Windows.

The MegaRAID card only applies to SSD/HDDs attached to it, but even though it's hardware RAID, you won't really find any benefit from it unless you're running hundreds of ssds or HDDS that would normally cause a CPU strain. hardware raid's primary purpose is to handle large external drive arrays. Will it work with 8 or less drives? yes, but it's overkill based on the system you're using (Think of someone using a RTX 5090 in their PC just to play solitaire).

If you don't mind me asking, what are your final and intent goals on this project (NAS server, tinkering, etc), maybe we can figure it out?

[DenzelD]

What I'm trying to achieve is to setup raid virtual disk boot drive built using the nvme drives that are in the dell ultra speed pcie card. I had hoped to use the tri-mode 9460 as the controller for this.

Maybe I'm stupid, maybe a masochist, but id like to make this work. There are probably a thousand better setups, but this is my waterloo.

The below article talks about booting from nvme configured in R1 connected to the 9460, albeit with the m2 drives in the flexbay. This had given me hope that what i wanted to achieve was possible.

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conve ... a8dee10caf

[frankr2994]

Maybe this thread will give you some insight. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.p ... ane.39417/

[stormsonweathers]

What I'm trying to achieve is to setup raid virtual disk boot drive built using the nvme drives that are in the dell ultra speed pcie card. I had hoped to use the tri-mode 9460 as the controller for this.

Maybe I'm stupid, maybe a masochist, but id like to make this work. There are probably a thousand better setups, but this is my waterloo.

The below article talks about booting from nvme configured in R1 connected to the 9460, albeit with the m2 drives in the flexbay. This had given me hope that what i wanted to achieve was possible.

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conve ... a8dee10caf

I wouldn't call what you want to do "stupid". we all had niche projects that we want to see through. Do you have the 04MMDF cable that was mentioned in your link?