Looking to populate older c222 board with nvme using PCIe adapter - Nvme with PCIe Gen4x4 to PCIe Gen3x8 adapter?

[Alfa147x]

Should I consider upgrading to dual pathing on the SA120?
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- Single SAS Cable (1 lane) Connection: Approximately 1200MB/s
- Dual SAS Cable Connection (2 lanes i.e., dual pathing): Approximately 2400MB/s


Edit: According to GPT 4:

Your Lenovo SA120 has WD 14TB and HGST 4TB drives, both with SATA III 6Gb/s, capped at around 600MB/s. Current single SAS cable provides 1200MB/s, so the drives limit the speed, not the connection. Upgrading to dual pathing (~2400MB/s) won't increase performance significantly due to these drive speed limits. However, it'll improve redundancy. The true benefits of dual pathing are seen in a multi-user environment or with faster SSDs, but it's less impactful for your HDDs.

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So the real answer Is that i need a layer of flash storage on my network and then the spinning disks become more archival vs our practice today where we just dump every thing across a few storage pools on the DAS

 

[Tech Junky]

PCIe lanes/$ ratio

Then AMD is the better option to an extent. The issue then becomes how the OEM splits them on the board. I want with the board I have because ASRock didn't auto split the top slot like others. Some will do x8/8 or x8/4/2 and weird math like that. Or they'll put all the drives off the chipsets which bottlenecks them to x4 bandwidth.

SAS is old and dying a slow death in favor of oculink. There is SAS 12&24 but oculink will give you more bandwidth.

 

[Alfa147x]

Then AMD is the better option to an extent. The issue then becomes how the OEM splits them on the board. I want with the board I have because ASRock didn't auto split the top slot like others. Some will do x8/8 or x8/4/2 and weird math like that. Or they'll put all the drives off the chipsets which bottlenecks them to x4 bandwidth.

SAS is old and dying a slow death in favor of oculink. There is SAS 12&24 but oculink will give you more bandwidth.

Do you have any favorite AMD ATX boards (i have half depth chassis)

 

[Tech Junky]

half depth chassis

Assume that matters for the cards not the board.

I've had really good luck with ASRock hitting all of the boxes in terms of price and performance. The last few Intel builds have been ASR as well. I also looked at Asus a bit closer as there were a couple of compelling options.

It really comes down to the features that matter most. Since I use my setup as a headless server mostly, a lot of things don't matter that someone else might be looking for.

 

[Alfa147x]

Assume that matters for the cards not the board.

I've had really good luck with ASRock hitting all of the boxes in terms of price and performance. The last few Intel builds have been ASR as well. I also looked at Asus a bit closer as there were a couple of compelling options.

It really comes down to the features that matter most. Since I use my setup as a headless server mostly, a lot of things don't matter that someone else might be looking for.

No, the server chassis is shorter than the DAS:


It's a short depth rack for city life:

 

[Alfa147x]

Oh! I'm sorry. I need micro-ATX making this even more difficult.
The superMicro X10SLL-F is

 

[nexox]

There was a post on here recently about a Mini ITX AMD board with a 16x slot and enough oculink and other ports for 12 NVMe drives, haven't located it yet, but maybe that would be useful?

Edit: Found it PROVANTAGE: ASRock Inc ROMED4ID-2T Asrock MB ROMED4ID-2T AMD Epyc 7002 SP3 LGA4094 DDR4 Deep mini-ITX

 

[Alfa147x]

There was a post on here recently about a Mini ITX AMD board with a 16x slot and enough oculink and other ports for 12 NVMe drives, haven't located it yet, but maybe that would be useful?

Edit: Found it PROVANTAGE: ASRock Inc ROMED4ID-2T Asrock MB ROMED4ID-2T AMD Epyc 7002 SP3 LGA4094 DDR4 Deep mini-ITX

Thanks but that’s too small. That mobo in micro atx is what I’m looking for.
I’ll look at the AsRock Rack ROMED6U-2L2T

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/products.asp#Server

looking at this it looks like no ASRock boards for AMD CPUs have oculink support for the microATX form factor

 

[Tech Junky]

oculink support

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09J5KL46H

MCIO is the interface. Otherwise you can use adapters. On the consumer side you don't get MCIO.

 

[nexox]

The connector used doesn't matter so much, oculink, MCIO, and various SAS connectors will all run PCIe (and thus NVMe,) you just need to buy the correct cables.

 

[Alfa147x]

I found out that ESXI 7 support will go through 2025/2027 so I'm going to hold out on this upgrade away from the Xenon E3-1230 v3/X10SLL-F. This combo has been good to me for a while, and I'm not ready to upgrade.


This PH45 PCIe Bifurcation card did not work

 

[nexox]

This PH45 PCIe Bifurcation card did not work

Did a single drive show up? If not can you force the link to 3.0 in the bios?

 

[Alfa147x]

Did a single drive show up? If not can you force the link to 3.0 in the bios?

Yes the single card showed up - I switched the adapter out with a single nvme slot tho

 

[nexox]

On some boards you may need to manually configure bifurcation in the bios, but your setup may require a PCIe switch. They are a bit odd to use, but the Intel p4608 (Oracle OEM) may work for you, they're basically two 3.2TB NVMe drives on a x8 slot and I am pretty sure they do not require bifurcation, though you may want to double check.