Planned setup, would this work? Any criticism?

Hardware Hub Storage
1

Hey, I’m new here, great forum!

The planned setup is based on an Asus W790E-SAGE. Two of the onboard M.2 slots are taken, and the 3rd shares lanes with the SATA ports, so they’re off-limits as far as the plan goes.

The requirement is to run 4 hot-swap (or at least easily accessible) NVMe SSDs at 4x lanes each, and 16 hot-swap sata drives at 1 PCI lane each.

The motherboard has two SlimSAS connectors (doesn’t specify further the exact type but based on some digging they appear to be SFF-8654 4x) that claim to support 4 lanes each for NVMe drives (no mention of SATA) but since there’s only two of these, and 8 motherboard SATA ports, we’re way short of the requirement.

The enclosure for the NVMe drives would be an ICY ToughArmor MB699VP-B V3 (hosts 4 NVMe drives through 4x SFF-8612-4i connectors) and an MB516SP-B (hosts 16 SATA 7mm drives through 4x SFF-8643 4-lane connectors).

The idea I had - and admittedly it’s a bit harebrained - is to get an Areca 1886-16i which has two 8-lane internal SFF-8654 connectors. One Areca slot would go through a Y splitter to two of the NVMe enclosure’s ports. The other, again, with a Y splitter, to two of the SATA enclosure’s ports.

The motherboard two SlimSAS ports would be connected to the remaining two NVMe slots, and (this is where it gets kind of stupid), I’d use two standard SFF-8643 4-way breakout cables in reverse to connect the remaining two SATA enclosure ports to the 8 SATA ports on the motherboard.

Would this work? Especially the SATA breakout cable part? What could I do better?

I know that the Areca only has 8 lanes to the motherboard but that’s - kind of - fine. I would love to use something like the Broadcom P411W-32P which sits on 16 lanes and provides 8 SFF-8654 connectors towards drives, and while it’s also half the price of the Areca:

a) I don’t think it will talk to SATA stuff at all, and

b) it’s a low-profile device and I’ve not been able to find a high-profile bracket for it which is stupid but a problem (unless it ships with one).

Since the motherboard SlimSATA ports are not likely to work with SATA either, it doesn’t look like I can do this without a SATA HBA.

2

Well, I think ICYdock might help here just make sure

Why is 4x lanes a requirement? I would use this in a 5.25" slot:

https://global.icydock.com/product_363.html

4x internal is only useful for internal transfers, 10 Gbps only require a single PCIe lane.

3

That is too many SSDs, and I already don’t have enough ports. And it would be 140 watts for 8 Sabrent Rocket Q 8s. The current plan is 4 of those, and that’s already getting uncomfortable.

No seriously that’s an amazing enclosure but this is an internal setup, I don’t want to run those at SATA speeds.

4

Again, what are you trying to accomplish here? That enclosure is coupled with a combined 64 Gbps bus, so you’d get 16 Gbps per drive in theory. Yes it is an 8 bay, so what? Just ignore the other four, you aren’t really losing anything. :slight_smile:

Unless you are trying to do some weird research setup that tries to go as fast as possible for Science, that enclosure is fast enough to support gen 4.0 speeds with four drives, 3.0 with eight.

But fine, here is the same idea for four drives: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084H5ZKPT

5

I’m already planning on that enclosure; well, a newer version of it (the MB699VP-B V3) because the old one with the SFF-8643 connectors has the wrong pinout for tri-mode HBAs.

The issue is more around the host connectivity side. One Areca is not enough to support everything, and I’m not sure my way of scrounging resources from the motherboard is a good way to go about this.

I was thinking of leaving the Areca to the SATA side completely, and trying the Supermicro AOC-SLG4-4E4T for NVMe connectivity. There’s not a lot of info on it though and it requires some weird BIOS tweak in addition to enabling 4x4x4x4x bifurcation:

  1. Enter the IIO DFX Configuration menu.
  2. Select CPU1 Configuration.
  3. Select the appropriate port option.
  4. Under Preset Settings, select DN Tx Preset and modify it to P7.