So I finally ordered one of these things. Ended up going with a ANM24PE16 quad M.2 card from ebay, as the prices on aliexpress were higher for these.
I did find a ANU28PE16 on aliexpress for only $93, however after adding on the cost of getting 4 M.2 devices connected to it (and M.2 really is kinda the only reasonable thing to adapt SFF 8643 to it seems, I'm not spending $40 on a 8643 to pcie female slot adapter, nope...) it came out to nearly 150, and there's a huge amount more bulk with that approach, plus going beyond 4 devices to 8, although impressive, seems very questionable in utility... what they should have designed is one of those with 8 M.2 slots, 4 on each side!
Thanks.
I did find a ANU28PE16 on aliexpress for only $93, however after adding on the cost of getting 4 M.2 devices connected to it (and M.2 really is kinda the only reasonable thing to adapt SFF 8643 to it seems, I'm not spending $40 on a 8643 to pcie female slot adapter, nope...) it came out to nearly 150, and there's a huge amount more bulk with that approach, plus going beyond 4 devices to 8, although impressive, seems very questionable in utility... what they should have designed is one of those with 8 M.2 slots, 4 on each side!
@UhClem could you answer a question I have about these. I take it that the functionality will be full duplex. That is to say if I plug a PLX card like this into an M.2 slot connecting it to my computer with 4 lanes, and suppose I have two high end 4-lane NVMes installed on it. If I do a copy from one of those drives to the other, will it go at half speed or full speed?? My hope is that full duplex means both receive and send could saturate the 4 lanes at the interface. This should be easy to test, if we don't actually know. But somebody surely has tested it and knows.I've had 3 of those for 2+ years. I like them.
Again, no worries. In SAS3 usage, the signal speed on the cable is 12Gbps (x4=48G); whereas, in PCIe3 usage, the sig spd is 8Gbps (per-lane; x4=32G)
Thanks.