Dell 13th gen. servers and NVMe/Bifurcation

 In case anyone is wondering, the Dell 13th generation servers can do PCIe Bifurcation.  

So first question for those not in the the know, what the heck is PCIe Bifurcation?  In simplest term is take a PCIe slot and sub-divides it into multiple slots.  IE a PCIe x16 slot can be divided into two x8 or four x4 slots.

Ok great buy why would one want to do this?  Well many people have found the wonders of NVMe M.2 hard drives, and run a NVMe M.2 adapter PCIe card. Sometimes the desire to run multiple M.2 cards is desired, but there simply isn't enough slots available.

A quick search on ones favorite shopping place for IT gear will show a number of cards that allow one to put two to four M.2 NVMe drives on a single card, however in order to use them, the PC must support Bifurcation, and with out it the computer will only see the first drive.  For the record, there are cards that can have more than one M.2 NVMe drive even if the PC doesn't have Bifurcation support, some have a RAID controller chip on them, some have basically a PCIe switch on them.  They are not very common place and are pricey.

In this case the case study is a Dell PowerEdge r930, with a $20 dual M.2 card from Amazon.

Note on depending on the card slot six might not be usable as the card hits the screw for the heat sink.

The setting change...also even though this machine has something like 10 PCIe slots only six of the have the setting.