Review on Dilinker U 2 PCIe Adapter PEX4SFF8639: Accelerate Data Transfer Efficiently! by Bim Cook

I used two of these cards to install two used eBay Toshiba 800GB U.2 NVMe drives in a Dell R720xd server. The adapters themselves are excellent, there were no problems installing them, either in hard drives or in PCI slots. After all it's just regular cards with nothing but a U.2 connector, a few screw holes to attach the drive (the screws that come with the cards are too short, luckily I have a lot of gear from old dead computers ). ) and a very small surface mount device (probably a resistor) and traces to connect the connector to the edges of the board. When I first started, I was a bit disappointed when my new NVMe drives didn't show up in the BIOS. or the Dell Hardware Inventory Management program that runs on cold boot. I thought I wasted my money because after all, Dell says in their documentation that this particular server doesn't support NVMe on the PCIe bus. But I kept playing with them and finally figured it out. The drives have their own BIOS/management software that loads last after all BIOS firmware, iDRAC, RAID card, etc. have loaded and just before the operating system boots. I simply set the boot mode to UEFI and both drives booted up immediately. Ubuntu recognized them on install and I installed them as Raid 1 software and it works lightning fast. The GUI is ready to log in in about 30 seconds when the OS finally starts booting, which is really fast compared to the 2 or 3 minutes it took to boot from the RAID array. A little overkill for a home lab. VM Host machine, but it's my toy, it's been fun, and every time I add hardware and it works (especially when Dell says it doesn't), it's a reward in itself. So everyone on ebay said $160 for two 800GB NVMe drives and about $60 for those two cards and I have a nice hot rod server!