please enjoy this piece of modern art i've just constructed
it's held together with sticky tape not just because it's thematically appropriate but also because i've lost the screws that came with it. or maybe the screws were never in the box in the first place. i'm not sure
"but does it work" yea sure, i just had to change port bifurcation to x4x4x4x4

@whitequark I tried a simliar thing, but turns out my (elderly) motherboard doesn't do bifurcation. So I had to buy the expensive card: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-2x4-ssd-low-profile-pcie-card/overview.html

Cause it has its own PCIe switch.

@krono this is not a new motherboard, it runs on lga2011v3. it just has a good (chinese) bios. from... this year actually

@whitequark Oh, my is around one generation newer (lga1151), but a generic AMI BIOS on an Asus "Gaming" board (Z170I) that came with the case.
I hadn't had high hopes to begin with; no new bios since 2018.

I just learned that the bios has a lot say in bifurcation…

@krono in practice i think it's mostly a bios thing. i think it's not actually very easy (if possible at all?) to lay out an X16 PCIe slot that cannot be split, but this is based on a distant memory of reading about the Intel FlexIO thing
@whitequark @krono You can bifurcate PCIe on desktop systems by changing lane assignment in IFD (AFAIK), but that only affects PCIe lanes hanging off of PCH (Chipset).
If you have a mobile SoC that has all lanes on SoC (like Intel N100) you can bifurficate all you want, same goes for AMD.
@elly @krono right, so it's entirely down to firmware then rather than mostly. thanks for confirming!