2

The goal is to determine if a Gen-4 NVMe is supported (Gen-4 bandwidth) in a Dell 3090 micro i3 10105T (Comet Lake).

  • NVMe slot is vacant
  • SATA Drive outfitted with OSX and Ubuntu

How to determine from command line if NVMe slot is gen 3 or gen 4? It is not clear to me that lsblk will reveal the NVMe specs.

The link does indicate a single instance of NVME-4:

enter image description here

It would preferable to confirm NVME-4 compatibility from the command line: before buying the drive. Reddit seems to indicate 10th gen CPUs do not support NVME-4?

gatorback
  • 6,523

1 Answers1

10

One way to determinate the generation of a slot where a device is attached is by its bandwidth.

+------------------+------------------------------------+
| PCI Express Gen  | Bandwidth per line (x4 slot width) |
+------------------+------------------------------------+
| PCIe Gen1        |  2 GT/s                            |
| PCIe Gen2        |  4 GT/s                            |
| PCIe Gen3        |  8 GT/s                            |
| PCIe Gen4        | 16 GT/s                            |
+------------------+------------------------------------+

First we need to identify at which PCIe slot the device is attached.

$ lspci | grep -i nvme

08:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller 980

Then we can get a detailed information about the slot and the device (and filter the necessary lines) by the following commands. Note using sudo is needed to get the verbose information.

1. Get the generation of the attached device.

$ sudo lspci -vv -s 08:00.0 | grep -w LnkCap

LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 8GT/s, Width x4, ASPM L1, Exit Latency L1 <64us

Here we can see the device supports up to 8 GT/s thence it is Gen3.

2. Get the generation of the PCIe itself.

$ sudo lspci -vv -s 08 | grep -w LnkCap

LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 16GT/s, Width x16, ASPM L0s L1, Exit Latency L0s <64ns, L1 <1us
LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 16GT/s, Width x16, ASPM L0s L1, Exit Latency L0s <64ns, L1 <1us

Here we can see the slot supports up to 16 GT/s thence it is Gen4.

pa4080
  • 30,621