Hey yall, I’ve been working on this project for my father-in-law for the last two months. Every step forward feels amazing but is instantly followed by two steps back.

He asked me to build him a database computer to store all of his work files in Raid 6 utilizing enterprise NVMe drives so when he pulls reports, it is done quickly. His current database is on a single 1 TB M.2 Samsung SSD from ~8 years ago, it’s a combined 600 GB SQL server database so not a massive collection.

This is the build:

Asus B650E MAX

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X

1TB M.2 Samsung SSD for Winders n such

128 GB 4800MT/s DDR5 ECC Kingston RAM

Broadcom 9660-16i Tri-Mode MegaRAID Controller

Broadcom Cachevault

4x Samsung PM9A3 2.5” 3.84 TB U.2 PCIe Gen4 SSDs (PN # MZQL23T8HCLS-00B7C)

2x Broadcom 05-60005-00 1m x8 SFF-8654 (SlimSAS) to Two U.2 SFF-8639 Tri-Mode Cable (Ordered from genuinemodules)

be quiet! Power Zone 2 750 W PSU

I’ve ran into countless problems throughout the process and I feel like I’m really close to having it done. Everything is installed and connected when I query StorCLI2 show, it shows the Broadcom card and cachevault are optimized. However, when I query /c0 show, it shows there are 0 physical drives. Going into windows disk management, it isn’t showing any uninitialized drives. Only the C drive, two partitions, and my USB.

The Broadcom harnesses are firmly connected to the U.2 drives, and the four male molex connectors are connected. I should mention that the PSU cables aren’t molex friendly: originally I had daisy chained the drives to the SATA-SATA-SATA-HDD cable using 3x SATA to female molex adapters. When I saw no physical drives and the SSDs were still cold, I eventually figured that there was not enough current for the drives to start up. I tried splitting the load: one harness with (HDD and SATA to female molex) and the other with (2x SATA to molex). Same result, no drives and all cold. As a sanity check, I tried disconnecting all of the drives and adapters, leaving only a single U.2 and the HDD connected. I was hoping with the full current available for the HDD powering the male molex on the U.2 connector that windows or the raid card would be able to see the drive. Still nothing.

I’ve learned a ton during this process and I’d do this entire project completely differently now. I went in blind and bit off entirely more than I could chew. I’m sure I’m looking over some minute detail (there’s so many manuals for this???). Some things I think may be critically wrong are the model number of the U.2 drives, the “geniinemodules” harnesses pinning, the PSU cabling, or some BIOS setting.

Any thoughts, prayers, advice, constructive criticism, and help in ANY way is more than appreciated.