One more minipcie

Hi there. At the moment I have Omnia installed into NAS case with the mPCIe to 2xSATA card occupying third slot:
image

Unfortunately, Omnia’s U-Boot has no ability to boot from the SSD (or HDD) connected via that extension card. So I had to setup extroot which I’d like to get rid of. To do so I plan to buy Samsung MZ-M6E1T0BW (860 EVO):
image

But I want to leave another big HDD and both wifi cards inside the router’s case. So basically I will have four cards (wifi 5.0, wifi 2.4, msata SSD and sata controller) and only three slots.

The question is: are there any options to split one of the mpcie slots to a pair of mpcie slots? Wifi 2.4 is required only for a couple of devices so I guess the best option for me would be to install both wifi cards into a single slot somehow.

I think about something like
image

But I’m afraid that this converter with two converters back from pcix1 <-> mpcie wouldn’t fit inside the case, there is no much space inside. Also I worry about the speed since I am unsure about the quality of such converters.

So I appreciate any advice. Thanks!

P.S. also, I’d be glad if someone can confirm that Omnia can boot directly from the 860 evo SSD after uboot settings are altered according to the wiki. I already failed to boot from ssd connected via converter so I’d prefer to know that omnia is able to boot from this ssd before buying it.

One of the slot is a combo mpcie/msata, maybe they can be split?

Or you can use a 2.4ghz wifi usb adapter, it needs to support AP mode in Linux.

At the moment I consider replacing internal 2.4 wifi card with msata ssd and usb wifi dongle as the best and the only option. However, finding

2.4ghz wifi usb adapter, it needs to support AP mode in Linux.

is a real challenge.

Maybe try something like this

I saw that thing. I’l be honest and it costs to much, more than 100€. And it’s not clear how good is it.