Can I use the BPN-NVMe3-216N-S4 backplane with any SC216 chassis?

[NPS]

Put all hardware parts together and tested the system today. No issues!

Great! Is gen4 working? If true, with which drives?

 

[sash]

Great! Is gen4 working? If true, with which drives?

I am using Gen3 SSDs - Intel DC P4510. So I cannot verify the Gen4 connectivity.

 

[sash]

My initial excitement about retimer card from Supermicro turned out to be premature. I could not get all 8 drives to be seen by the system. Two out of 8 disks would go missing. I had to go with a much more cost effective solution instead by ordering PCIe to SFF-8654 Adapter PCIe 4.0 x16 to SFF-8654 (2x) 8i for U.2 NVMe SSD:

PCIe to SFF-8654 Adapter PCIe 4.0 x16 to SFF-8654 (2x) 8i for U.2 NVMe SSD | eBay

(No included SFF-8654 to SFF-8639 cable). PCIe to 8654 Adapter. Interface 1-port 4i SFF-8654 2-port 4i SFF-8654 2-port 8i SFF-8654. PCIe PCIe 4.0 X4 PCIe 4.0 X8 PCIe 4.0 X16. Not support SAS or SATA SSD.

www.ebay.com

Now all drives are present and I can continue populating bays with more drives once I get my hands on them.
Moral to this story - simple bifurcation works without any fancy hardware.

 

[ano]

10G tek has been very good to me.

but its good of you to test both, which retimers did you have from sm?

 

[sash]

AOC-SLG4-4E4T

 

[mattventura]

Do third party retimers support backplane management? I was under the impression that you could only do that with SM adapters.

 

[sash]

Well, I have SM backplane, but retimer did not properly work with my ASRock motherboard.

 

[Iaroslav]

FYI, X11DPU+BPN-NVMe3-216N-S4 worked out! 20x nvme plus 100G NIC in place. Just one switch used, not a big penalty in performance. Bald and affordable, maybe someday I will try to upgrade it to X12
Keep on SM, stocks skyrocketing!