I got a video camera that records beautiful but huuuuge RAW video files, its interfaces to storage media are SD card, CFast 2.0 and USB 3.0 (5 Gb/s).
USB 3.0 maxes out at around 450 MB/s actually usable transfer speed however this is too impotent for the highest quality settings of the used video codec and depending on the actual compressabilty of the recorded image, sometimes frames do get dropped.
CFast 2.0 uses SATA 6 Gb/s as its interface (the fastest one the camera offers) and there are such adapter cables to connect a regular SATA drive to the CFast 2.0 slot.
Now… I’d like to adapt M.2 NVMe drives to SATA so that I can connect them to the CFast 2.0 slot of the camera?
Why not just M.2/2.5" SATA SSDs?
It’s a huge PITA to transfer the as mentioned rather large video files with 550 MB/s to a computer to further edit them compared to good NVMe drives.
Since there now are second-gen external exclosures to use NVMe SSDs with 20 Gb/s USB-C (I currently use such a solution for testing) I was wondering if there might even be an active adapter so that I can connect the NVMe SSDs to SATA/CFast 2.0 to gain around 100 MB/s higher possible transfer speed for the camera to use while recording (compared to USB 3.0) which might be enough to finally max out the quality setting without dropping frames
Well I had to read this 3 times to figure out what exactly your problem is
Maybe this will solve it:
Edit: I pasted first one I found, but there are plenty of other manufacturers. I would suggest you look at some reviews if this even goes to 6Gb/s. On the other hand its only like $15, so… try for yourself and post your findings please
Edit2: As Log pointed below, this is only for SATA M2, so uselless for your application. Sorry.
It seems to me that you want to write files at your camera speed but then read them at NVMe speed? So you to plug the NVMe drive into the camera, but then slot it into a PC to read it at full speed.
If I have that right I guess it makes sense. One problem I see though is those M.2 connectors aren’t really designed for a lot of plug/unplug cycles.
M.2 SATA slot will be allocated to the chipset directly, occupying within one of the onboard SATA ports [Manual should address which port becomes unusable, if a SATA M.2 is applied]
I believe you are coming confused about something.
I was referring to the linked adapter, which will not do what aBav.Normie-Pleb wants to do, which is to take an m.2 nvme drive and connect it to a sata only protocol camera.
This flat out doesn’t work, and to my knowledge there is not a single adapter available which allows an nvme only drive to communicate with sata.
I don’t know where there’s anything unclear in the thread opening exactly…?
If you think so check up what M.2 PCIe, M.2 SATA, PCIe, NVMe, SATA, AHCI means.
Until a short while ago I would have thought that it is impossible to adapt PCie NVMe to “traditional” USB (not Thunderbolt) and it works quite well so far.
This is why I was hoping that a similar “strange” thing (PCIe NVMe <-> SATA AHCI) might also exist.
NVMe to SATA is going to be bad for almost everybody. Hence why there are none available.
I do understand you device has limited compatibility. Maybe just get a decent SATA SSD?
Those NVMe enclosures you mentioned are using chip-sets like RTL9210 to work. I doubt you will find one that suits SATA due to limited demand. I have read reports on some chip-sets being horrible and cause I/O errors. Maybe investigate that a bit.
Overall, it seems weird, because SATA 6Gb/s will stop around 600MB/s per device. So it is very close to your USB speeds. CFFast do not even reach the SATA limitation.
