Connecting U.2 to W790 boards

At least two of the W790 boards for the 2400 series Xeons (ASUS and ASRock) have connectors which seem to be intended for connecting U.2 drives at up to Gen4 speeds. I’m curious, though, if a particular special cable is needed to actually make these work? I know that Wendell and some other forum users have had some trouble getting PCIe 4.0 speeds to enterprise grade drives when using M.2 or PCIe adapter cards. Has anybody actually tried this with the W790 boards?

I’m sure there could be trouble if you tried this with poor quality cables.
I’ve been able to get my slimsas connector working on a PCIe 4.0 drive at 4.0 speeds using one of the passive microsata sff-8654>sff-8639 cables (advertised as a 4.0 cable) on a sage w790 mb.

This is speculation but I think the reason M.2 often has trouble is because of the amount of adapters it needs to go through before reaching the U.2 drive degrades the signal.

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Thanks, that’s exactly the kind of sanity check I was hoping for.

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