4

I want to add a bunch of SSDs to my PowerEdge R720xd, and the highest-density way to do that seems to be a card like this Dell Ultra-Speed Drive Quad NVMe M.2 PCIe x16 Card.

However, the specs on this card say that it requires PCIe bifurcation support to allow the x16 slot it is plugged into to pretend to be four separate x4 slots.

I have looked all over, and I can't seem to find whether my 720 supports PCIe Bifurcation. (I found people who say that the 730 does, but that's the next generation, so it doesn't help me.)

Does anyone know the answer or where I can find it? Is there any way to determine by querying the system or looking in the BIOS, short of buying and installing the card to see if it works?

Moshe Katz
  • 3,053
  • 3
  • 26
  • 41

1 Answers1

5

A side by side comparison of the manuals for the R720 and R730 shows that there are BIOS settings that need to be changed to allow Bifurcation on the 730. (I had assumed that the system should be able to figure it out automatically based on the presence of the cards.) Since my system doesn't have those BIOS settings, it must not support Bifurcation.

Moshe Katz
  • 3,053
  • 3
  • 26
  • 41