But it never specifies which cable. Is there a good reference for all these various sas/sata/u2/u3/m2 connectors?
Or should I be looking at an pcie addin card instead? I’ve got plenty of slots available.
Also I just realized it may only supports pcie 3.0 on the u.2 port, ive been treating it as 4.0 port.
Elsewhere it claims two U.2 slots wired to PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth.
They worded it very badly - the motherboard does NOT have U.2 connectors, but “Mini-SAS HD” connectors. (The U.2 connector - on the disk side only - looks very much like the SATA power+data joined together).
All you need is a Mini SAS HD to SATA cable like this one.
(search to get lots of options - Mini SAS HD is also called SFF-8643)
Honestly I would take the great opportunity of having those ports built in to use those to go to a pair of 1.5TB Optane drives… Best gaming drive in a raid you could get.
Love optane drives, I’ve got a p5800x on my desktop, and a 905p on my secondary.
The wrx80e sage ends up running a bunch of bulk storage - truenas, I was looking at the dual actuator drives, or maybe switching it over to unraid.
Unfortunately, no - both the CPU (1 “U.2” port) and the chipset (second “U.2” port) only support SATA (or a single NVME x4 drive).
So, while you CAN get SFF-8643 to 4x SFF-8482 cables to connect to SAS hds, the mobo would simply not see those connected SAS drives.
Since you dont lack PCIe slots, the solution if you need individual SAS hds is a simple $15-20 used LSI SAS3 HBA coupled with the cables I mentioned in the last paragraph
