yes, but if I’m not mistaken the 9305-24i is a clowncar setup similar to the Startech card he linked above, with three 9300-8i chips and a PLX pcie switch, so you triple the power consumption of a 9300-8i (12w x3) while also adding another 10-ish watts for the plx switch. Same story for the 16i version (two chips and a plx switch). Or there were different versions? I’m sure there is at least one version that was a clowncar and I noped out immediately from these high port count 93xx cards.
If he gets a 9400-16i card it’s all a single chip in the 12-15w range, but it’s still pcie 3.0, so the x8 slot is a must.
Another candidate for 16-port card is an Adaptec ASR-71605, with similar specs and power consumption (it’s SAS 6gbit instead of SAS 12gbit but that does not matter for Sata drives that are 6gbit anyway), but massively cheaper if you get it used on ebay especially from china. I see them going for 25 euros vs 100+ euros for the 9400-16i.
These cards can be switched to HBA mode from their bios settings (it’s true HBA mode, equivalent to IT mode for LSI/Broadcomm. Not the fake “disk-sized volume” bs some LSI raid cards can do in what they call JBOD mode)
See here for a comparison and power consumption numbers (at the bottom of the post)
Doing some math again, a pcie 3.0 x8 slot is 8GB/s (theoretical) and Sata 6.0 maxes out at 600MB/s (or 0.6GB/s) so we are looking at connecting up to 13 sata ssds to the sas card before it hits a bottleneck (in theory, in practice it’s probably more like 12 ssds).
If you want more, you need to look at Broadcomm 9500, which is pcie 4.0 x8, so the numbers above double, and you can connect 26 sata ssds. Also adaptech has newer cards on pcie 4.0 x8 but I never needed either so you’ll have to look that up on your own.
Yes the first two M.2 are wired to CPU so they are independent (the second M.2 is pcie 4.0 for some reason, probably not that big of a deal though).
DIMM.2 slots are connected to chipset so they will share the upstream bandwith with Sata controller, and with the other two x4 slots on the motherboard. As said above, the chipset is connected to CPU with DMI at whatever version, and in this case it is an equivalent of pcie 4.0 x8.
Since the Sata ports are using an equivalent to pcie 4.0 x2, you still have a pcie 4.0 x6 worth of bandwith from chipset for something else. Possibly using one for the x540 network card you mentioned in the other thread, which is pcie 3.0 x4 so it’s like pcie 4.0 x2.
That leaves enough bandwith for the other pcie 4.0 x4 slot, or for one DIMM.2 slot, without bottlenecking.
Again from the specsheet of the mobo:
<strong>Total supports 6 x M.2 slots and 4 x SATA 6Gb/s ports*
Support Intel® Core™ Ultra Processors(Series 2) *</strong>
M.2_1 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 5.0 x4 mode)
M.2_2 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)
M.2_3 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 5.0 x4 modes)**
M.2_4 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 5.0 x4 modes)**
**Intel® Z890 Chipset**
DIMM.2_1 slot (Key M) via ROG DIMM.2, type 2230/2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)
DIMM.2_2 slot (Key M) via ROG DIMM.2, type 2230/2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 4.0 x4 mode)
4 x SATA 6Gb/s ports
I saw your other thread where you find out your current 10gbit card is pcie 2.0 so it cannot run both ports at max speed on a x4 slot, and got recommended a x540 that is natively pcie 3.0 x4, so I assume this is superseded?
That’s actually a good reason to get a SAS card, especially in these hard times. You can still get decent deals with SAS drives because most people can’t use them.
The issue here is that his NAS is using SSDs and it seems he cares about the performance. Since an ASM1166 only has a pcie 3.0 x2 upstream interface, it’s bottleneck city for more than a couple SSDs. Those cards are 100% fine and imho recommended if you are doing a more normal spinning rust setup where each drive is never going to hit more than 250MB/s even in optimal conditions (and in real usage less than that).