I purchased this expansion card for SSD harddrives and installed it, together with 2 SSDs inside it. I was hoping the Software center/Additional drivers will pick it up after reboot, but it did not, and so far those harddrives are not registered by the OS.
If you would need more info about my HW, here is my hardware probe result. I have the newest BIOS installed (did that before installing Linux on this machine). Correct me if I am wrong, but even the hardware probe can´t see this hardware.
Can somebody help me figure out what am I suppose to do to make it work?
I would wager that the card itself isn't being seen by your bios at all if it's not being seen at all. Realistically I presume that you would mostly just see 2 individual drives, at least that's what the hope would be with a card like this.
It might be worth a dive into your BIOS to check settings relating to your pcie settings. I've had it in cases sometimes where they would be set at possibly pcie 4 or 5, and in order for it to function correctly with something with a lower version, you need to set it manually to the lower version (I do not know if that is an option in every BIOS, but my BIOS allows this). Also make sure everything is plugged in fully and the card has been fully seated as well.
That setting you're highlighting appears to be relating to the CPU, we don't want to be touching that one. I don't know the model of this motherboard exactly, but how many pcie slots does it have? In theory the setting you'd be looking to change should be able to change them independently of each other (if it allows it)
Which this would indicate that you would need to install this adapted into your top slot (E1) in order for the card to function. If it's currently in the bottom slot (which it probably would be if you have a graphics card) then it probably wouldn't function.
Unfortunately in this case I just don't think it's going to work for your setup. I'm surprised it's only rated at pcie2, but that makes sense why there's not option in the bios for those slots.
PCIe gen 2 vs 3 was a fairly large jump between the two, and if your card is specifically rated at gen 3, then I highly doubt it would work with gen 2 (especially given the nature of nvme drives and speeds). You could always upgrade your motherboard, however, and just swap out the components into the new board. Not a very hard thing to do, especially nowadays.
PCIe gen 2 is very old at this stage on the consumer side.
Well, if the Case offeres the Place, You could simply take 2 SSD's and put it in the Case on the Mounting Positions for Drives. What Case do You have? Because Your board is an MSI B450 Tomahawk, the Board is an ATX Board. So, You need a bit Space.
From the manual it appears you have one m.2 slot presently (key M) along with another 6 sata ports.
You could grab a couple of Sata ssds and use them through the sata ports. You will still notice a massive difference compared to a traditional hard drive in terms of system responsive by a massive factor. Just because they don't use NVME, don't count them out on their usefulness. They're also cheaper than NVMe drives, which is a plus in my books.
Correction to post 11:
On further thought, since the card is a PCIe to SATA adapter card, it should work in the E4 PCIe slot - no direct SATA bus access would be needed. (SATA access IS needed for m.2 slots on the motherboard for SATA m.2 drives. Not the case here.)
Did you remember to connect the required power cable?
Allright, in the end I lost my temper with the card and returned it.
I suppose @applecheeks37 was right, since no matte what setting in the BIOS I changed, the card just did not get registered.
Will try to find some other solution.
One thing you could do to test, although I don't know if you can, is if you have a cpu that has an integrated GPU, you could remove your external GPU (in slot 1) and test booting up with the card in that slot. If it did, you know the gen of the slot is causing the issue rather than anything else.
I do not have such a CPU, but thanks for consideration
Will try to consult with a guy I bought it from about HW possibilities and where to go from there.
