M.2 10G/Multigig Ethernet Adapter Announced - Ideal NIC for TinyMiniMicro?

[NateS]

I just ran across a new product announcement for something I was hoping someone would eventually make, and I think might be of interest to a lot of folks here: a 10G/5G/2.5G/1G RJ45 ethernet adapter in a M.2 2280 form factor.

Innodisk Releases the World’s First 10GbE LAN Module in M.2 Form Factor | News | Information | About Us – Innodisk

Innodisk has announced its all-new EGPL-T101 M.2 2280 10GbE LAN module, the first 10GbE LAN designed in M.2 form factor, features flexible integration and excellent compatibility with existing network

www.innodisk.com

These look ideal for adding high speed networking to smaller boards that lack PCIe slots, which is often true of the smaller TinyMiniMicro systems available. It would be cool if STH could review these once they're available (or if y'all don't get to it, I may pick one up myself and report back).

 

[BlueFox]

Given that Innodisk targets industrial applications primarily, I bet it's not going to be cheap or cost effective for most SFF systems, but guess we shall see.

 

[NateS]

Yeah pricing is the biggest unknown here, and may make this a non-starter if it's too high. But I'm optimistic it won't be too bad, as they have an older dual gigabit version on sale for $70, which seems pretty reasonable for a somewhat niche item. Most of the single port gigabit ones I've seen are at least $30. And their product announcement mentions that gaming is one of the applications they're targeting with this (weirdly enough), even calling out low latency performance, so perhaps they intend this to be more mainstream than much of the rest of their catalogue.

 

[Thorburn]

I received a couple of these modules to test with recently and have done a video looking at them here which might be of interest.

One of them is in my Ryzen 7 5700G + X570 home server build, whilst the other was fitted into a small form factor system for testing but is going to live in my main workstation - both fitted into PCIe 16x to 4 x M.2 2280 riser cards using PCIe Bifurication to enable me to maximise the usage of PCIe slots and lanes inside the systems.

In terms of pricing, Simms (Embedded Peripherals | Simms International) are the UK distributor and quoted me around £200 and shipping for the EGPL-T101, with price varying a little depending on exchange rates. Obviously for US pricing you'd need to talk to a local distributor.

Hope that's helpful!

 

[Goof]

Interesting.

Given some of the 1L form factors out there, like the HP EliteDesk 805 G8 Mini ... you should be able have a stainless steel HP FlexIO face plate fabricated (and powder coated, plus silk-screened) to properly mount the 10GbE RJ45 port to, and correctly install/scure inside the HP EliteDesk 805 G8 Mini chassis. There are certainly services like PCBWay that do that for someone who can model one.

That means an actual, proper mounted (and looking), bonafide 10GbE port (PCIe 3.0 x2) in an EliteDesk 805 G8 Mini.

Who might be enterprising enough to model some faceplates for the common 1L form factors with two M.2 slots? There's definitely a market for it.

 

[PigLover]

That heatsink is awfully tall to fit into most of the 1L boxes. You'd have to figure out a cooling solution.

 

[Goof]

The ProDesk 405 and EliteDesk 805 Mini has about 20-22 mm of clearance above a normal installed M.2 SSD.

The heat sink on the InnoDisk module is 15mm. Plenty of clearance.

If I had an EliteDesk instead of a ProDesk (if I could buy a 35W 5750GE in the EliteDesk, I would have one ordered), I’d already have one of these coming and be looking to produce drawings to have faceplates made. 10GbE, full bandwidth, properly mounted in a 1L has been my dream for a while, and now it appears possible. A three node, power sipping, tiny Apache Spark cluster not super bottlenecked on the network interface has been the dream for a while.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

I received a couple of these modules to test with recently and have done a video looking at them here which might be of interest.

That's interesting.

Given that PCIe 4.0 extender ribbon cables are a thing, I wonder if a M.2 card that was just the card and a socket for an extender cable would work, connected via the extender cable to the actual 10GbE Ethernet transceiver which could be mounted elsewhere (like on a low-profile bracket).

 

[anthros]

That's interesting.

Given that PCIe 4.0 extender ribbon cables are a thing, I wonder if a M.2 card that was just the card and a socket for an extender cable would work, connected via the extender cable to the actual 10GbE Ethernet transceiver which could be mounted elsewhere (like on a low-profile bracket).

To go a bit further, I wouldn’t mind M.2 cards becoming a de facto PCIE expansion standard for SFF machines.

Plenty of M-ITX motherboards have 3 M.2 slots…ditching the standard 16-lane PCIe slot on those boards (used mostly for graphics cards) would allow *seven* M.2 slots if the motherboard folks could find the space on the board.

That would allow a 25 GbE ethernet card and six 2-4 TB NVME drives (6-12 TB in aggregate with RAID-10) in a very compact package.

Yes, please!

 

[Thorburn]

Plenty of M-ITX motherboards have 3 M.2 slots…ditching the standard 16-lane PCIe slot on those boards (used mostly for graphics cards) would allow *seven* M.2 slots if the motherboard folks could find the space on the board.

I run mine in a riser which breaks out the PEG slot in to 4 x M.2 slots. Because I'm using a Ryzen 7 5700G APU I only get an 8+4+4 configuration though, not the 4+4+4+4 that the non-APU models support.
Even so I have 4 x M.2 NVMe SSDs and the 10GbE M.2 card installed, with 2 SSDs in the mainboard.

My other system (X299 with i9-10980XE) lets me run 4 x M.2 cards.

 

[anthros]

I take your point about having a lot of NVME drives in one machine. And yes, risers and dedicated cards will get you four drives in an X16 slot, and that can be a lot of data. But a 10-gigabit Ethernet link has a real-world transfer rate of one gigabyte per second, or about one third of what a decent PCIe3 NVME drive will deliver.

This probably matters a lot if you’re using NVME drives. If you didn’t want to do more than saturate a 10GbE link, you’d get a lot more space and similar sequential speeds for less money by using four spinning hard drives in RAID10, right?

if I could wave a wand, I’d be able to choose from a selection of Mellanox 25, 50 and 100 GbE cards in an NVME or U.2 form factor. While PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 take care of bus bandwidth for those cards, I’m the first to admit that it’s not really possible to fit the components for an SFP28 connector in a 2280 form factor right now—and a QSFP28 connector is clearly a non-starter.

But ASRock Rack has an M-ITX motherboard with two onboard 25GbE ports. If an Intel chipset has enough PCIe lanes for that, three onboard NVME slots and an empty X16 slot (to be filled with a four-card riser), well, now we’re cooking with gas.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that my ambition here is not lots of NVME drives in a small volume, but rather a cheap-and- cheerful NVMEoF implementation. But hey—that’s just me.

 

[ms264556]

ASRock Rack has an M-ITX motherboard with two onboard 25GbE ports.

I'd love this. Is it released yet? Do you have a model number?

 

[BlueFox]

I'd love this. Is it released yet? Do you have a model number?

Probably one of the new Xeon D-1700 series motherboards. Supermicro has one coming. It's going to be ~$1500 on account of the integrated CPU, so don't get too excited. Nothing socketed.

 

[anthros]

Oof--I was mistaken about ITX boards with 25GbE. As BlueFox suggests, I was thinking of a D-1700 board, the D17006U-4Q--but that's an mATX board, not ITX. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

ASRock Rack > D1700D6U-4Q

www.asrockrack.com