The sata connections are provided directly by the CPU, as opposed to on motherboard chipset or riser card chipset. I wouldn’t be surprised if Asrock is using a weird cable pinout though that requires a special cable or riser+cable combo though.
The CPU PHYs for P0 and G3 can “repurpose” PCIe lanes directly into sata lanes, all Sienna platforms that expose these two ports can do this unless explicitly disabled in BIOS which is extra work by the OEMs.
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Just a heads up that Sienad8-2l2t is available on Newegg today. Not a ton of stock though (seems like 4 are available).
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I was right! Just got my board and tried this adapter (because I have a SAS/SATA backplane with a slimsas connector) and it recognized my SATA drives just fine!
FYI with two of these adapters you could theoretically use 32 (!) SATA drives with this board.
I’m doing some more testing and will post some power consumption figures soon.
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Alright finally got to do some testing after waiting literally months for a motherboard that wasn’t the Gigabyte ME03-CE0.
I tried to be as scientific as possible here, but I’m sure I’ve missed a few things so forgive me if I have. Feel free to suggest changes to my approach.
Hardware set up on my test bench
- Epyc 8324p 32-core processor
- Arctic 4u-M with single fan
- No other fans
- Sienad8-2l2t on the latest bios (1.13)
- Crucial 6 x 48 GB 1xR4 DDR5 4800
- 1 x Intel/Solidigm P5500 7.68TB U.2 connected via MCIO connector onboard.
- XFX 850W Gold PSU connected to 110V main
- IPMI ethernet connected
- 1 x 10Gbe ethernet connected.
- Kill-A-Watt meter to measure usage.
Software stack:
- Fresh “typical” Ubuntu 24.04 Server install with OpenSSH included
- No other software installed
I used the following post on this forum to tweak efficiency settings: AMD Epyc 8004 Energy efficiency settings (Proxmox)
Idle power results:
- 55 Watts out of the box with defaults
- 53-55 Watts with BIOS settings from above
- 51-53 Watts with Kernel parameters from above.
Happy to try any reasonable tests or tweaks suggested
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Just to be clear, you used that 10Gtek adapter in either slot 7 or 3 and set it to SATA mode in BIOS first? I just bought one of the ASRock motherboards and a 8224p so I’m trying to figure out my plan to connect disks.
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yup, exactly.
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Cool, thanks! I am planning on testing the motherboard/cpu this weekend.
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another stock update: Newegg is out of stock now but provantage has 10 in stock of the Sienad8-2l2t
Sorry for the spam. The Tyan s8040 is also available on Newegg, but frankly I don’t suggest a homelabber get a Tyan board.
I’ve had both their S8030 (Epyc Rome/Milan) and S8050 (Genoa) boards, and their BIOS is super locked down, and there’s basically no way to control the PWM Fan settings. I found some IPMI commands for the S8030 on STH, but not for the S8050. For the S8050 I have been trying to get support to help me out for the last few weeks and they have been abysmal – according to them, the board only supports full speed, or manual at a fixed percentage, which doesn’t make any sense. They have tried to close the ticket multiple times when I’ve asked for clarification. Maybe their boards work really well in their own integrated systems but at least for homelab use I haven’t had a good experience.
I’m looking for a platform with more PCIe lanes than consumer processors with good idle power. This seems perfect for homelab use, except for price. I’m hoping that the motherboards become more affordable with time.
- I see a lot of these boards have extra features like 10GBE or SFP+. Do those use additional power even when nothing is plugged into those ports? If so, is there any way to disable that? My ideal board would have some sata, sfp+ and no 10GBE RJ45 ports.
- What chassis / cases are you guys using to take advantage of the 96 lanes of connectivity that Siena offers?
- All these boards have crazy model names, at least I’ve never been able to decode them. Is there a decoder or standard way that the different manufacturers name their boards?
- Are there any specific retailers that specialize in server parts with international shipping? Its hard / impossible for me to find the processor or motherboard locally for me.
I am in the same boat as you, I’ve had my eye on the SP6 platform for a while. My ideal motherboard would be the Asrock Rack SIENAD8UD3, but it’s not shipping yet. I might just buy the SIENAD8-2L2T instead and use the breakout adapter autoturk suggested to turn one or two of those PCIe slots into SATA ports.
As for networking, it does have 10GbE RJ45 ports. According to the block diagram in the manual, it’s connected to the CPU with PCIe 3.0 x4, so that’s not all that much connectivity lost for an adapter I will not end up using. It is possible to disable the onboard NICs in the BIOS.
For my chassis I am looking at a Sliger CX4712.
autoturk, are you still happy with the 2L2T?
SIENAD8UD3 is shipping in EU at least. Ordered mine from Mindfactory about 2 weeks ago.
That (edit: the SIENAD8UD3) looks like an interesting board! Have you had an opportunity to use it yet? Any experiences to share?
What CPU are you going to use with it? Any idea of idle power draw? Did you manage to get U.2/3 drives working via MCIO?
Haha, lots of questions; don’t go out of your way to answer them, I probably cannot justify the expense of upgrading from my current 4650G NAS/hypervisor anyway. But yeah, it looks cool! 
I have a working u.2 drive (pcie4) connected to my supermicro Genoa board.
I’ve been using SIENAD8UD3 for about a week. Drop-in replaced EPYC 7443 and SM H12SSL-NT in a TrueNAS Core setup.
Idle power draw with 8024P CPU, 6x RAM and 2x Noctua fans was hovering between 20W and 30W measured from the EPS power cable with ElmorLabs PMD-USB. PMD-USB doesn’t account for PSU efficiency losses. I did not bother to average it out but it’s probably closer to 30W than 20W.
I have HDDs connected thru bundled MCIO → SATA cable in a flexiDOCK MB830SP-B enclosure and U.3’s (Micron 7450 Pro) connected thru cheap Aliexpress MCIO → Oculink cables in a ToughArmor MB699VP-B V3 enclosure. All work without a problem.
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Very cool, thanks for sharing!
That’s better than I’d expected! That makes this a very reasonable homelab or home server setup from a power draw perspective.
Nooo… must… not… drop €1700 just to get more PCIe lanes and memory channels lol
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