looking online and it seems the cant do bifurcation at 4x,4x,4x,4x is a CPU limitation and pci to nvme switch stile cards that are pci4 start at 400$ doable but again were to put it.
So From What I can tell its upgrade/ replace motherboard and cpu. Or save an obscene amount of money and buy pre-built server.
Well off to used Ryen thread ripper it is then.
This points to a poor choice of motherboard : x8 + x8 is more useful than x16 for a server.
Check if it can do x8x4x4… If so, you could use an adapter to host a half-height HBA and a pair of M.2 in the slot.
How about max RAM to your MoBo, and make RAMdrive for Minecraft, which is properly snapshotted and backed up to either NVMe or SSD or even to HDD.
I have some Minecraft servers running up to 5-8 players, and we never had any speed problems on 2x500GB mirrored, sATA 3 chinese Xraydisk array.
(however, they were all vanilla MC servers)
Also, if you want to get the benefits of that crazy NVMe speeds OUTSISDE of our TN box, you need faster network too. A Gbit saturates around 110MB/sec, a 10G network at about 1-1.1Gbyte. that is less then a speed of a Gen 2 NVMe. As I found out, with a network that has Windows systems on it, you can go up to 40G networking, and that got down pricewise from the “crazy” to the “not that expensive any more”. 100G might have some issues on Windows systems. If my understanding is correct, the windows network implementation is single threaded, so it needs like 5+GHz CPU to work at full speed.)
If money is an object for your plans, you need to be creative. Everybody can spray 10 thousands of USD to solve problem :-D!
I have a Crafty environment for Minecraft servers on my server.
It is running on az Ubuntu VM with 8GB RAM and 4 CPU cores.
The storage is a set of cheap chinese, sATA 3 SSDs.
(120GB for the linux and 2x500GB mirrored for the Minecraft data)
It is available from anywhere from the world by DDNS and port forwarding on an 50/20Mbit VDSL.
My experience is that the 8GB RAM is the bottleneck for this system. It is OK for 1 vanilla instance, may run 2 vanilla instances in parallel, but the RAM is definitely not enough for more instances or heavily modded game.
After the upgrade I plan to move this setup to Windows. I created a VM with 64GB RAM and 16 CPU cores and a single, 1TB NVMe M.2.
I bought such a card 2 weeks ago from Aliexpress for like twenty something EUR.
It is a half size card (so, fits into a 2U case too, has a half size bracket in the package, and if also includes 4x alu heatsinks for the NVMe drives.
It arrived really fast and I am really happy with it. (I mean the looks and the feel, while I did not install it so far, since I dont really need it right now.)
YEP bad choice of motherboard bad choice of CPU
as for the adapter i would only get 1 drive as it can only do 8x8x its limited by the CPU
ill be jumping chip from intel to AMD epic pro line of chips and motherboard
i found this It’s a motherboard and CPU combo its supports ECC has a max ram of 2tb, has All the Pci lanes. i can put this in the slots and have it go to this later. ill be using riser cards first though as there not 400 dollars icydock seems to cost a lot for nvme drive cases.
I switched to Epyc primarily for the epic amount of lanes.
I have a GPU, two HBAs, two quad-nvme cards, and plenty of lanes to spare…
Yes, IcyDock will quickly grow more expensive than a rack case with NVMe backplane.
Another issue is that you may need riser cards with retimers to achive PCIe 4.0 speed reliably.
How many NVMe slots are you after? Some pro-level rackmount chassis actually offer standard U.1 bays – they’re generally more robust and reliable than NVMe, while maintaining the same form factor. You might want to check out Lenovo’s workstation lineup; they often feature these.
Yes but looking at your sig, not many people have a petabyte of data storage in a homelab.
+1 for a used Epyc motherboard/CPU/RAM combo from eBay etc.
