I just bought a new Lenovo server (ST650 V2) and can’t figure out how to make NVMe disks work.
The server came with a RAID controller preinstalled (Broadcom MegaRAID 9560-8i) which supports the use of U.3 NVMe drives. However, I don’t know how to connect them properly, even after reading all the support documents and the Lenovo Product Guide.
The server has a 8 x 2.5" SAS/SATA drive bay with a corresponding backplane. The RAID controller is connected to this backplane. Putting a U.3 drive into one of the bays doesn’t work, the system won’t recognize it. I also bought a NVMe backplane, but this isn’t even supposed to be connected to the RAID controller, but only the onboard NVMe ports.
Does anybody have any idea how this is supposed to work? My plan is to build a RAID 10 consisting of four U.3 NVMe disks.
Into which backplane did you install the drive?
Does this backplane have an expander chip?
What kind of cable are you using between raid card and backplane?
I’m building a system with 6x U.3 7.68TB NVMe drives with the same Broadcom RAID card and to connect them I intend to use Broadcom 05-60006-00 cable. This cable is for 8x U.3 drives. I hope that it will work.
I have the same cable to use it with SAS and SATA HDDs. That works without a problem.
I don’t have any U.3 SSD yet.
I think theoretically it should work, but I think you would only have x1 lane worth of connection between the drive and raid card, if the drive can operate in x1 mode. But not exactly sure.
Sorry for the late reply, I didn’t get any alert that someone answered.
@gysi: I installed the drive into the SAS/SATA backplane (I didn’t expect this to work but had no other idea so tried anyway). The backplane is connected via a SlimSAS to SlimSAS cable to the RAID controller. I don’t know about the expander chip.
The Lenovo Product Guide also mentions a NVMe retimer adapter a few times, but I have no idea if this is something I’d need for this.
As far as I understand, each disk will only use one lane, however, PCIe 4.0 x1 still offers significantly more speed (2 GB/s) than SATA 6G. That’s why I wanted to go the U.3 route instead of the (obviously easier) SATA SSD route.
@Lui: I think I will give this cable a try, thank you.
Edit: The cable @gysi mentioned looks even better, as it offers x2 speed for four disks instead of x1 for eight (I only need four).
Edit 2: Of course it would be even more elegant if I used the backplane instead of connecting the U.3 drives directly and have them loosely laying in the drive bay. As far as I can tell, the NVMe backplane has four SlimSAS connectors, so theoretically, a SlimSAS x8 to 4SlimSAS x2 cable - if something like that even exist - should do the trick, right? But then again, I already connected the SAS/SATA backplane via SlimSAS to SlimSAS and the drives didn’t work …
Okay, so I just connected one of the U.3 disks via the SlimSASx8-4SFF-8639x2-U.3 Adaptec cable to the RAID controller, but it still doesn’t work. Each cable has a second cable attached to it (I suspect this is for power) and I think this is the problem: The U.3 disk (a Micron 7450 Pro) has a small port on its backside but this is way to small to insert this big four-pin power cable into - so the SSD gets no power.
On the Adaptec site it says this cable is for “direct attached connectivity for SAS/SATA/NVMe adapters” so I think maybe I need something else to make this work - but I have no idea what. Or maybe I need yet another adapter from this big power cable to a small one that I can insert into the disk to give it power?
I already bought four of these disks, otherwise I’d take the performance hit and just get four SATA SSDs.
Edit: After looking at the internal cabling again, I think that the power cable has to go to a power source from the server, not into the SSD, because the RAID controller doesn’t supply power (duh). Of course the server offers no four-pin connection, so I guess I’m now looking for an adapter cable.
Power is supplied via the U.3 connector, but yes you need to connect a 4 pin peripheral power cable to the other cable on the U.3 connector side of the cable if you want to direct attach the drive.
If connected via NVME backplane then there’s usually a separate power connecton for the backplane, and the data connection is done via the slimsas connectors. I’m not aware on a slimsas x8 to 4 slimsas x2 connector. I only see slimsas x8 to 2 slimsas x4 connector.
The power idea looks correct
Similar features for SAS breakout cables, with a 4 pin molex for power.
If you check the link posted by Gysi, as a reference, there are 2 products with matching strings as your product. One is for directly connecting drives to a controller (yours, with power connectors) and another for adapter-to-blackplane connections.
It does not have a pic of the backplane one, but they are described as having 2 MiniSAS:
Backplane
This is an internal SlimSAS ×8 (SFF-8654) to 2MiniSAS HD ×4 (SFF-8643) tri-mode cable to connect a SAS/SATA/NVMe adapter to an NVMe backplane.
Okay, so I think connecting each U.3 disk to the power supply isn’t gonna work, because all I have available are a few slots for connecting the various available backplanes (at least that’s what they’re labeled). I’d probably need some freaky molex to 14-pin-with-two-rounded-corners kind of cable.
I also have the official NVMe backplane from Lenovo with a matching power cable. This backplane has four slots (SlimSAS) which are supposed to be connected to the onboard NVMe slots (also via SlimSAS). So what I could do instead is try to find a SlimSAS x8 to 4SlimSAS x2 cable to connect the RAID controller to the backplane.
Unfortunately, Adaptec doesn’t seem to offer such a cable (I could only find SlimSAS x8 to 2SlimSAS x4) and a quick Google search didn’t produce a result either, so it seems I’d have to go the SATA SSD route.
I finally got a Broadcom 05-60006-00 cable and it seems that Micron 7450 Pro U.3 NVMe drives are not working on it. Probably drive doesn’t support 1x “NMVe bandwidth” that is available using this cable. So the question is if there is a SlimSAS x8 to 4xU.2(3) cable available or I’m stuck with 2x Micron 7450 (with Broadcom 9560 8i) or 4x (with Broadcom 9560 16i) NVMe drives using SlimSAS x8 to 2xU.2(3) cables?
I really wonder if Micron NVMe drives could work with ACK-I-SlimSASx8-4SFF-8639x2-U.2-0.8M cable?
Yeah, Lenovo has both a Server Product Guide and a Cabling Guide, but all the schematics have the NVMe backplane connected to the onboard controller, not the RAID controller.
Anyway I just ordered Broadcom 05-60005-00 cables (SlimSAS x8 to 2xU.2) and this should work. I guess that I need now a Broadcom 9560 16i card to utilize 4 Micron drives. I wonder if there is an option to utilize 6-8 NVMe U.3 drives on one 16x PCIe 4.0 slot without going U.3 to M.2 connector mess?
They are 16x PCIe 4.0 cards and allow to connect more than 4 NVME SSDs.
I don’t have any Micron U.3 NVME drives yet to test if you can run it in 1x, 2x lane mode.
OK I’ve tested now Broadcom 9560 8i card with 05-60005-00 cable and of course, 2x Micron 7450 pros are working really fine with 7GB/s sequential speed in RAID0 config. Well I guess that I need 9560 16i then.
Hi !
I plan to build a server with same Broadcom 9560-8i RAID controler and 05-60006-00 broadcom cable to direct connect 3 (no U3 SSDs) Startech 's U.3 adapters to M.2 NVME SSD’s.
