I’ve got an empty 5.25" drive bay that I’d like to put a 4x drive enclosure in for SSDs, and a free x4 PCIe 4.0 slot. Initially, I was planning an 4x IcyDock that would let me use 2.5" SAS SSDs, but without an HBA, that’s not really feasible, and I’m not aware of a viable PCIe 4.0x4 or PCIe 3.0x4 HBA, and the slots are closed on this motherboard.
Assuming I can’t safely modify the slots (I probably can’t without help, let’s be honest), it occured to me that I can get a PCIe 4.0x4 OcuLink card, and combine it with a U.2/U.3 enclosure. I had some practical questions about doing that.
Is it fairly plug and play to get a card, cable, and enclosure and just hook everything up and have it work in, e.g., Proxmox or TrueNAS SCALE?
Assuming it is, what sort of PCIe card should I be looking at? Any recommendations for specific models? Since these are OEM parts, I’m not familiar with a lot of the brands I’m seeing.
Likewise, any recommendations for a 4 slot 5.25" bay enclosure?
Realistically, assuming this actually works the way I think it does (that I can use Oculink to put 4x NVME/U.2 on a PCIe 4.0x4 slot via an enclosure), how will the temperatures on the drives be? I’m wanting this thing to be quiet (not silent), but it’s my understanding that U.2 drives can get pretty hot.
I use IcyDock enclosure and I replaced the stock fans with Noctua 40mm connected to mainboard fan header (enclosure fan header + switch wasn’t that useful for my needs). Set to 2500rpm results in 40-50°C for my Micron 7400 drives. Not silent, but fairly quiet. Stock fans are very noisy.
Don’t ever let U.2 drives without any airflow. They don’t need 8k RPM fans, but passive cooling won’t cut it.
Obviously depends on the drives as they vary in power and thus heat.
It’s a PCIe device. It’s just like any other NVMe drive showing up as /dev/nvme0
I bought an x16 PCIe card with 2x MCIO 8i ports which connect to the backplane via 2x2 Oculink connectors. Bifurcation card with 2x MCIO basically.
4x4 lanes = 16. So you need a x16 slot for 4x NVMe. Unless you get a fancy expensive PCIe card with a PCIe switch chip. I don’t think there are x4 cards for that though.
Thanks for all that info. Aside from my PCIe slot being stuck at x4, none of that sounds too egregious.
On the other hand, since I’ve only got a single x4 slot, sounds like I’d be stuck with a single NVME.
The lack of options for PCIe 3/4 x4 controllers is really unfortunate. The only one I’m aware of is a PCIe 2.0x4 card. It’s a really ancient LSI HBA. Maybe that wouldn’t be terrible for 4x 2.5" SATA SSDs? (PCIe 2.0x4 = 2 GB/s, 1 SATA SSD = ~0.5 GB/s on average). It’d max out at 1 GB/s on write, at best, but it’d be cheaper, cooler, and I could get a good bit of space with old SAS 2.5 SSDs.
(I really wanted to put an LSI 9500-8i in here, but that’s a no go if I can’t modify the slot or find some sort of 4x to 16x riser cable that would work.)
Aside from my PCIe slot being stuck at x4, none of that sounds too egregious.