Hello everyone!
I've been following the in4 forum for a while now and have always admired the technical expertise here, so I figured this would be the best place to ask about a rather specific hardware issue I have. I recently embarked on upgrading my home server, which I use for both virtualization and data storage. I wanted to finally clean up my file structure and completely isolate the operating system from the main disk arrays.
To this end, I invested in a solution like the " Expansion Module Boss Controller," which allows me to mount two M.2 NVMe drives in RAID 1 mode directly on the PCIe bus. In theory, this should be the ideal solution, saving valuable M.2 slots on the motherboard and providing a secure, mirrored boot drive. However, this is where the problems begin. One particular issue that bothers me most is the controller's visibility in UEFI as a boot device. While Windows and Linux can see the array without issue after booting from a USB flash drive, my motherboard's BIOS (Z790 chipset) stubbornly insists there's no bootable device there.
I suspect the problem might lie with the way the motherboard allocates PCIe lanes, or with the lack of "Option ROM" support for this particular module on consumer motherboards. This is a bit frustrating, as I spent half the night running cables and fine-tuning the airflow in my case, and now I'm stuck at a stage I can't get past with a screwdriver. Has anyone else played around with such "server" add-ons on consumer motherboards?
I'm wondering if it's a matter of enabling some specific feature in the advanced settings, or maybe these controllers are simply too specific for regular desktops, and without native support from the motherboard manufacturer, I won't be able to get anything done. In your opinion, is it still worth fighting CSM/UEFI modes, or is it better to just give up and go back to the classic method of plugging drives directly into the motherboard's slots?