M.2 PCI-E Card

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Hello list,

My instinct says the vast majority will “just work” but I’ll ask anyway.

I need a low profile PCI-E card that allows for up to 2 M.2 SSD drives that is known to work with the stock kernel in CentOS 7.

Can anyone recommend one?

Thanks

6 thoughts on - M.2 PCI-E Card

  • Once upon a time, Alice Wonder said:

    I can’t recommend a specific one, but any adapter card should work. However, note that M.2 is not a single “thing” to the computer; the drive interface can be SATA, PCI-E AHCI, or PCI-E NVMe. The first two would look the same as a traditional SATA device to the OS, so should be fine. The third is a different interface; I haven’t looked to see if the CentOS 7 kernel supports NVMe (I suspect it does, but you should check before buying an NVMe device). I know that NVMe works fine with recent Fedora.

    Also note when choosing an adapter; the M.2 slot is keyed different for the different device types, so make sure you get an adapter that matches your device.

  • Thanks! I ordered a 2.5″ SATA drive and they screwed up and sent me M.2
    – I’ll be sure to look at the booklet (Intel SSD 5 but there may be more than one variant?)

  • To add a data point, I built a stock CentOS 7.3 VM in ESXi 6.5 with hardware version 13 to include NVMe support. The VM boots and runs great on the virtual NVMe controller.

    Jack

  • Not perhaps absolutely definitive, but the Dell configurator allows you to specify RHEL7.2 with the Dell branded NVMe PCIe M.2 drives – it doesn’t allow the Intel PCIe NVMe SSD cards though. It’s happy with non-NVMe M.2 drives.

    P.