This post is part call for help, part PSA, part rant:
So I bought a Icy Dock MB699VP-B and ran into some compatibility issues. I couldn’t get any drives installed in the bay to show up anywhere.
Turns out they have a disclaimer on the product page that says they don’t work with OCuLink. I’m a bit baffled as to why this would be, both miniSAS HD and OCuLink can be use for different interfaces (SAS, SATA, or NVMe) and both source and sink are NVMe.
Their website says its due to different cable pinout by some manufacturers. Isn’t this why there are standards??? I feel like someone in the chain of parts didn’t follow the standard. If anyone knows of a cable that would work, I’m all ears (or eyes since this is a forum…) Otherwise I’m not really sure what part or parts I’m swapping out to get working. Either find a different dock or go all miniSAS HD.
Both the motherboard OCuLink and the AOC OCuLink yield the same results. The only other cables I have to try are some M.2 to U.2 (SFF-8639) cables and of course that works without the dock.
You can email them for support for your use case, but cabling with this is a PITA.
Seems like " We plan to release the Oculink compatible NVMe enclosures in the second quarter of 2020, welcome to sign up ICY DOCK Newsletter to receive product updates." you will probably have to wait for that one / get an HBA to get your current one to work
Unfortunately I found that page after purchasing. My fault really, but it isn’t obvious and is frustrating. NVMe exists on OCuLink and is becoming more prevalent on boards. I feel like there should be a cable somewhere that would enable this to work with OCuLink and I’m going to dig into it more as time allows.
Yes I have emailed support. New version is now anticipated Q2 to Q3 of 2021. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that date holding though. I’ve asked them for the pinout they are using. We’ll see if I hear back.
I mainly posted here to see if anyone had gotten these to work with OCuLink and specifically what cable they used if they have. I thought @wendell may have tried it with OCuLink had found a cable that worked but aliexpress has a lot of OCuLink to SFF-8643 cables (including the one I already have) and I’m not sure which cable he is referring to.
In the meantime I’ve been reading though the SFF-9402 spec and checking the cabling via multimeter to see what might be wrong. My plan is to get a OCuLink to U.2 cable that works and compare its pinout to the pinout of the OCuLink through SFF-8643 to U.2 on the Icy Dock and see where they differ.
So far all the problematic sideband pins seem to line up with the spec except WAKE# (P1 on U.2, A10 on OCuLink). From what I’ve read its somewhat optional, but maybe its needed for OCuLink? Its bi-directional so maybe OCuLink needs the WAKE# signal to initiate a connection. IDK.
Yeah. Especially since U.3 uses the exact same connector but changes the location of most of the PCIe lanes.
Icy Dock supplied me with a pinout (sorta). They gave me some information for each connector but not details on the connection between the 2 connectors. I honestly thought I wouldn’t get anything so I’m impressed.
From what I’ve read in the SFF standards this is what U.3 and SAS-4 is supposed to help solve.