So I want to do a proxmox build and found some offerings for relatively cheap 2TB Solidigm P4600 U.2 NVME SSDs. I am planning to use 4 or 6 of them to create a ZFS pool. Since I have never worked with U.2 drives, I am not sure how all the connections pan out. My current motherboard is the Supermicro H11SSL-i, so it can handle bifurcation.
I found this 4-port 5.25 to 4x2.5 dock, which seems perfect for my use case: https://icydock.com/product_182.html. My problem now is how to connect them to the motherboard. Would simply getting PCIe 16x to 4x SFF-8643 like this one and connecting them with the SFF-8643 cables work?
I found this thread, which seems to cover the topic, but does not make much sense to me. They talk about retimer cards (?) like this by Supermicro. Are they really necesarry?
All in all, I am a bit confused, so I hope you could help me out here 