3 posts tagged with "Hardware Hacks"

Welcome to the edge of enterprise desktop hardware hacking. You bought a Lenovo Tiny6, decided it wasn't complicated enough, and crammed a custom expansion board into it. We respect that.

However, because we are forcing consumer and custom hardware to play nice with Lenovo’s locked-down enterprise architecture, things don't always work perfectly on the first boot.

This article is here to help with that. This is a living document. As long as people keep finding creative ways to push the PowerRiser to its limits (and occasionally break things), we will keep updating this page with solutions.

If you looked at a 1-liter Lenovo enterprise desktop and thought, "This needs to hold a server's worth of solid-state storage," you are in exactly the right place.

Today, we are combining our custom M90q riser board, a cheap dual-NVMe adapter, and the hardware bifurcation mod, and we are going to cram five NVMe SSDs into a single Tiny6 1L chassis.

The result? A dense, stupidly fast PCIe 3.0 RAID 5 (RAIDZ1) Network Attached Storage device that doubles as a high-tech space heater.

Recently, user xstefa12 opened an issue on the NandFarm PowerRiser GitHub, on how to bifurcate the x8 PCIe bus from the CPU.

While the PowerRiser design for the M90q/P340/P350 relies on tapping the unused PCH lanes to provide a plug-and-play NVMe slot without requiring any host board modifications, this alternative project goes straight for the throat: it forces the Intel CPU to physically bifurcate its main x8 link.

Here is a breakdown of how it works, the custom hardware involved, and how you can replicate the hardware mod on your own M90q/P340/P350 motherboard.