Well, at least this is the statement of their PM I had received in the communication on a support case.
After I plugged one of these Optane 900P 280GB beauties into the M.2 slot
(see https://www.servethehome.com/difference-intel-optane-900p-280gb-ssdpe21d280gasm-ssdpe21d280gasx)
on an A2SDi-H-TF motherboard I couldn't enter the BIOS setup anymore.
Everything else worked perfectly, i.e. entering the built in EFI shell, bringing up the boot menu and booting into Linux. The OS does see the NVMe drive and can read and write it. Just hitting <Del> during POST did leave me at a black screen with a small "A9" in the lower right corner.
The Supermicro support was not very helpful and after initially dropping their latest beta BIOS version on me I received the statement in the headline of this post.
The communication went on for a month until I decided that this will go nowhere and that I better find a solution myself or use the drive for something else.
So I disconnected the Optane 900P which enabled me to enter the BIOS setup again.
I disabled the SATA support for the M.2 slot and disabled loading the OPROM for the M.2 slot, reconnected the Optane drive and voilà - I can enter the BIOS setup now also with the Optane 900P connected to the M.2 slot.
I cannot tell which of the 2 BIOS setup changes helped because I didn't want to spend any more time experimenting with the setup. It works for me because I will only use the Optane SSD as a pure data drive for ZIL SLOG and L2ARC and do not plan to boot from it. Nevertheless I thought I share my experience with everybody who's planning to use a combination of Optane and SM Denverton MB.
Lessons learned:
1. Intel Optane drives do work in Supermicro Denverton boards as pure data drives.
2. They will probably not work as a boot drive because for this loading the OPROM code would be required.
3. Don't count on support from Supermicro for this combination.
4. STH users are not important to Supermicro.
After I plugged one of these Optane 900P 280GB beauties into the M.2 slot
(see https://www.servethehome.com/difference-intel-optane-900p-280gb-ssdpe21d280gasm-ssdpe21d280gasx)
on an A2SDi-H-TF motherboard I couldn't enter the BIOS setup anymore.
Everything else worked perfectly, i.e. entering the built in EFI shell, bringing up the boot menu and booting into Linux. The OS does see the NVMe drive and can read and write it. Just hitting <Del> during POST did leave me at a black screen with a small "A9" in the lower right corner.
The Supermicro support was not very helpful and after initially dropping their latest beta BIOS version on me I received the statement in the headline of this post.
The communication went on for a month until I decided that this will go nowhere and that I better find a solution myself or use the drive for something else.
So I disconnected the Optane 900P which enabled me to enter the BIOS setup again.
I disabled the SATA support for the M.2 slot and disabled loading the OPROM for the M.2 slot, reconnected the Optane drive and voilà - I can enter the BIOS setup now also with the Optane 900P connected to the M.2 slot.
I cannot tell which of the 2 BIOS setup changes helped because I didn't want to spend any more time experimenting with the setup. It works for me because I will only use the Optane SSD as a pure data drive for ZIL SLOG and L2ARC and do not plan to boot from it. Nevertheless I thought I share my experience with everybody who's planning to use a combination of Optane and SM Denverton MB.
Lessons learned:
1. Intel Optane drives do work in Supermicro Denverton boards as pure data drives.
2. They will probably not work as a boot drive because for this loading the OPROM code would be required.
I cannot completely exclude the possibility that it would work because I never tried to boot from my Optane SSD.
3. Don't count on support from Supermicro for this combination.
4. STH users are not important to Supermicro.
This is no surprise looking at the business potential. However the level of "non support" on this case was outstanding.