I’m planning on giving an older machine a small upgrade with an SSD, but since that machine does not have an m.2 port, I was thinking about buying the cheapest PCIe adapter I could find. Besides the obvious stuff like ports, PCIe gen and lane count, is there anything I should look out for? Specifically regarding Linux?

  • make sure your motherboard can split your pcie lanes

    I heard of bifurcation in that context, but how is that called in “mainboard spec lingo”? What buzzword should I worry about?

    Dell made this awesome four ssd card with fan and everything, can only get it to run in dells.

    It’s a Dell, so I’m safe here.

    • Somewhere in the bios will be a pcie option, it will look like “4x4x8” or “8x8” or some combination of the like. Most dell workstations and servers have this option that I have run into. If you don’t see this in the bios then you will only be able to run one nvme ssd