Hi there,
Help me clear up bifurcation vs HBA.
I am trying to make sense of connecting storage to a motherboard. I would prefer to go ssd over spinning rust as I do not like noise in my work environment and I do not need THAT much storage.
I can get some 960gb ssds for about the same price between m.2 or regular sata. It is my understanding I can connect sata with e.g. a 9207-8i and I would be good to go with most consumer hardware motherboard / cpus. It is also my understanding that if I want to connect m.2 drives I would need something like the asus Hyper M.2 X16 to keep the riser card cheap but then I need a cpu and motherboard that support bifurcation x4x4x4x4 for an x16 slot.
Should I just avoid the hassle of bifurcation and m.2 expansion cards and go for an hba and sata 2.5 ssds; or is it no problemo throwing in two of these asus cards, bifurcate 2 slots to x4x4x4x4 and run it that way? I realise I will hit heavy bottlenecks on pcielanes but I do not care that much about speed, I pretty much just want it quiet and if the m.2 cards are as easy as the sata cards then I would prefer that due to space.
TL:DR Is bifurcation hassle worth it to use m.2, or is an HBA much simpler in terms of config and compatability given the m.2 and sata drives are the same price -- Using proxmox if that matters.