I had a really great comment on the blog post detailing my experience with the Minisforum BD795i SE motherboard detailing a card that can be used for making full use of your PCI-e slot by allowing you to use (2) NVMe drives and STILL have use of your PCI-e slot with a riser card configuration. This is awesome and just what I have been looking for.
Why? Well, with the limited space on a mini-ITX motherboard like the Minisforum BD795i SE, you don't have many options. There are (2) NVMe slots and (1) PCI-e slot. So, if you want to add a 10 GbE card for example, you burn the PCI-e slot for any other use case like more NVMe. However, I had a commenter on the post that brought up a solution they are using to get around this problem. Frankly, I didn't know about this type of card.
These kinds of little devices are what makes home labbing fun in my opinion. It allows creative solutions to challenges we encounter. I have just placed one of these on order and should have in for testing very soon and will let you know my thoughts and any challenges or problems I run into. Here is the card:
You will need to make sure your motherboard supports bifurcation or this card won't work. So, as an example, you can't use with the Minisforum MS-01. However, you would probably have additional issues there with things fitting in the case. The below screenshot is from my Minisforum BD795M.
