CWWK N305 4x2.5GBit - 4x M.2 Expansion Board - How to enable PCIe bifurcation?

[Cellgalvano]

Hello everybody,

after seeing the review of the CWWK N305 (seems to be the CW-AL-4L-V2.0 N305 tall-fin Unit - with 6x USB2 and 2x USB3) I ordered one with the shown M.2 Expansion Board (CW-ADLN-4PCIE V0.6).
I would like to install 5 M.2 Drives. So far I installed Proxmox on the first drive that is installed on the M.2 Wifi to M.2 Adapter.
Now I want to install the storage drives in the 4x expansion adapter (installed above the other drive and the RAM).

If I install the first drive in the first slot of the adapter it is showing up (lspci says its 1x - without the adapter shows as 4x, which is expected), but not in the other slots.
Does anyone know how I enable 1x1x1x1x PCIe bifurcation for the adapter? I assume that this is the issue, but I can not find an option for this in the BIOS.

Thanks!

P.S.: Seems that I should have posted this under Hardware -> Networking, sorry.

 

[tibbe]

Did you find a solution? I'm looking at buying the same board.

I thought the motherboard only supported one NVMe and that slot is used for the expansion card for a total number of 4 drives. Are you saying there are room for 5? Are there two NVMe slots on the board? I'm surprised there's enough PCIe lanes for that.

 

[Cellgalvano]

I continued the topic here. There is a long thread discussing all about this mini pc / board.
TL;DR: Yes you can use 5 M.2 NVME SSDs with V2 (all running in 1x mode). Alder Lake N has 9 PCIe Lanes which then will be split like this (using the other BIOS version, see the liked thread): 4 lanes for the I226-V 2.5GBit NICs, 1 lane for the M.2 WIFI slot (which comes with an adapter to M.2 NVME), 4 lanes for the M.2 NVME slot (above the WIFI slot). The last 4 lanes will then be split into 4 individual 1x M.2 slots using the expansion board.
I can confirm that V2 allows you to use 5 NVME drives, 4 NICs and the USB 3 ports.

 

[splifingate]

Hello everybody,

after seeing the review of the CWWK N305 (seems to be the CW-AL-4L-V2.0 N305 tall-fin Unit - with 6x USB2 and 2x USB3) I ordered one with the shown M.2 Expansion Board (CW-ADLN-4PCIE V0.6).
I would like to install 5 M.2 Drives. So far I installed Proxmox on the first drive that is installed on the M.2 Wifi to M.2 Adapter.
Now I want to install the storage drives in the 4x expansion adapter (installed above the other drive and the RAM).

If I install the first drive in the first slot of the adapter it is showing up (lspci says its 1x - without the adapter shows as 4x, which is expected), but not in the other slots.
Does anyone know how I enable 1x1x1x1x PCIe bifurcation for the adapter? I assume that this is the issue, but I can not find an option for this in the BIOS.

Thanks!

P.S.: Seems that I should have posted this under Hardware -> Networking, sorry.

I do not have the 1X x4->4X x1 expansion board, but I did note this setting (see attached) in the bios (AL-4L-V2.0).