In short, I want a PCIe card for this m.2 card. The question is whether I need the slot to be compatible for SATA or NVMe.
I purchased this card to expand my SATA HDD options on my home media server, but now I’m seriously confused. This is allegedly an NVMe card which has an ASM1166 chip on it, and has an m-key for an m.2 PCIe slot.
The problem is that (according to Grok) the ASM1166 chip uses SATA, not NVMe, so now I’m unsure. I suspect Grok is correct and that the vendor has labeled it “NVMe” because it is using an m-key. But ultimately, I just want to know what card to look for, and the difficulty is that I expect some cards will similarly say “NVMe” but it’s compatible for this m-keyed (SATA?) card and I don’t want to order a SATA PCIe card which expects a b-key and rejects the m-key.
Grok is correct in describing it with SATA but you’re worrying overmuch - yes, it’s SATA for the 6 SATA ports. On the other side, it’s a bridge to PCIe and the form factor is that m-keyed M.2 interface. I hope that explanation helps.
I don’t have a PCIe card to point you to for adding this m.2 card into but it seems like the shortest distance between two points is to buy a PCIe card that has multiple SATA ports!? I think you’ll find that the LSI SAS 92xx series are a popular HBA (host bus adapter) recommend on this forum and that budget storage enthusiasts want it in “IT mode” not RAID mode so that they can run their redundancy options in the OS, e.g. ZFS in Linux.
M key M.2 slots are effectively PCIe slots in a different physical form.
With the card pictured you’re going from PCIe → ASM1166 → SATA.
NVMe isn’t really involved here at all… it’s just that people/marketing sometimes refer to M.2 M key as NVMe M key.
Yeah the chip on that board is a pcie device. You can’t turn one sata port into a bunch of sata ports, eg. 1 m.2 sata port → a board with 6 sata ports. You want to plug that into an m.2 port that has pcie lanes per your motherboard’s block diagram.
Even ignoring the sata vs nvme confusion in the marketing, the photo you gave clearly shows the pcb printed with “M.2 M PCIe”
An M.2 port is almost always a PCIe x4 port.
But for future reference, the ASM1166 runs on 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0
As others mentioned that adapter needs to be installed in a M.2 Key M slot that’s usually used for NVMe SSDs.
To clarify the terms:
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SATA is an electronical interface, the protocol (“language”) it speaks is called AHCI.
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PCIe is an electronical interface (the most low-level general-purpose one in regular computers), PCIe SSDs use the protocol NVMe.
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If you see “NVMe” then you can assume that the slot or device talked about is PCIe though the language is inprecise and vague.
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The ASM 1166 HBA is good, be careful when plugging in SATA cables in since the PCB is pretty fragile and test it a bit before using the connected drives for important data:
Technicaly, you can, there little boards available for that (https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005005124421345.html?pdp_npi=4%40dis!EUR!24.58!23.50!!!200.96!192.11!%402140e7df17548574195957798eca42!12000031755492776!affd!!!&dp=Cj0KCQjwzOvEBhDVARIsADHfJJTQc8IAkILUZKSgjkZofZvHSPS9fBg_E_ko_24HR-iuZEt2ZiWrN-oaAi4yEALw_wcB&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22672450303&gbraid=0AAAAADihhqUOZu6uEj4kM_luuSYZf2Dtc&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzOvEBhDVARIsADHfJJTQc8IAkILUZKSgjkZofZvHSPS9fBg_E_ko_24HR-iuZEt2ZiWrN-oaAi4yEALw_wcB&aff_fcid=f6cc28f3fc854063add340b626f5b911-1755000574498-09004-_oEmQFg2&aff_fsk=_oEmQFg2&aff_platform=api-new-product-query&sk=_oEmQFg2&aff_trace_key=f6cc28f3fc854063add340b626f5b911-1755000574498-09004-_oEmQFg2&terminal_id=9822a05284524c2aa7877eb82c6ceb6e&afSmartRedirect=y)) the downside is that it can’t access multiple drives at the same time so this is not a popular solution.
The asm1166 card is a nice little hba from what I heard.
Thanks for the confirmation. I suspected the “NVMe” & “SATA” labels were sometimes wrong; but, I don’t have the time or money to buy a bunch of differently labelled cards and test them.
For people like me, who know a little bit, if these companies marketed their terms correctly and precisely, I would have much less difficulty understanding what I need.
The other answers above already told you pretty much all you want to know, but to answer your original question, what you want is something like this. Make sure the PCIe slot has 4 physical lanes.
You could also use one of the x4/x4/x4/x4 bifurb cards for x24 SATA ports if you’d like. Something like this.