As far as power goes I have several 12v power supplies and buck up/down converters-I can get something to work out. Although, I’m pretty sure the included sata power adapter with the 5.25 bay (12v 3a ~ 36w) would handle the load if I’m doing a jbod and only really hitting one/two disks at a time. Raid would be overdrawn if all bays are populated.
So, I’m looking for an in-between for my home nas running unraid and my computer, I’ve got 2.5 gig networking in the house but that’s not really snappy enough to really do anything but faster file transfers rather than working off of in any capacity.
The questions
Would usb c 3.1 gen 2 allow this splitting at the nvme adapter?
Would it show all the drive info or would it be one drive in appearance/ not show serial #s?
I’m assuming I’d be capped at 6gbps transfers (1 drives max transfer) to this if everything works unless I somehow get them to raid then 10gbps?
Would raid be a thing in this setup or would how the drives present themselves to the system be an issue?
You could probably make this if I am reading it correctly but USB to more than 1 nvme is going to be slow unless your only really accessing 1 of them at a time.
Edit:
didnt click amazon links due to not removing tracking so to much work yeah idk about usb to nvme to SATA drive adapter.
I’m pretty certain this wouldn’t work, as the USB NVME adapters I suspect only support nvme devices, rather than broader PCIE compatibility (which the sata adapter is depending on).
Just use a USB hub and USB-SATA adapters (or a different USB direct attach drive enclosure, although most of these are sized for 3.5" rather than 2.5" drives).
Either way this feels an awful lot like an XY problem.
Ah, I should explain I’m trying to get rid of the octopus on my desk, so adapter cables are not the solution to this one as that is the current solution. This project was born to clear clutter from my desk and I just so happened to have the 6 bay icy dock as hand me down from my nas when I went to an nvme raid 1 as my cache instead of a handfull of 2.5s and I also happened to already have the 5.25 bay external case. The goal is 2 cables 6 drives- no desk mess.
I’ve looked at other DAS devices but they are all either 3.5 or ridiculously expensive once you cross the 3-4 bay threshold or they don’t present the device IDs to the system properly and make it infuriating to use in zfs, and other storage protocols. So budget wise buying an external dock would be adding at least 100$
From what I’ve read the JMicron JMS583 does only support nvme drives as it takes usb and makes it a pcie gen 3x2 slot yes, but I thought the asmedia ASM1166 chipset takes that pcie lane and makes it sata.
Edit, somehow the JMS583 also says it’s backward compatible with usb 2.0 only limiting line speeds which confuses me as to how it pipes a pcie lane in for the drive. Only thing I can think of is it’s not actually piping in but taking a pcie lane and stepping it down to usb. So rather than pull pcie from the computer it presents itself as a usb device to the system. Meaning device Ids will probably be a wreck so only jbod to answer one of my earlier questions in theory. I could look for something on the JSM586U line of chips that seems to be the better version of this chip but I have a feeling the budget will go to the moon.
Thunderbolt is something I’ve looked into but I haven’t had much success in finding 10gbps with a decent controller. They advertise up to 40gbps but once I pull the controllers they all cap at 3.1 gen 1 5gbps speed. I know they exist but finding a company that uses them in their product. If you have any recommendations I’ll pull the spec sheets and see what controller it uses provided it’s not over say 75$ as at that rate it’s easier to just upgrade to 10gig networking though I lose the portability aspect.
p.s. sorry for the awful links I posted very top of the morning for me before coffee