Will Supermicro SATA Bay Power U.2 NVME Drive?

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ere109

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My motherboard (x11sph-nctpf) has two Oculink PCI-e x4 connectors. Supermicro sells an Oculink to four SATA breakout cable.
My reading suggests that the Oculink is NVME only and won't support SATA drives, but that the data interface is the same, except that U.2 drives have an additional power input.
My chassis (Supermicro 836) has the TQ backplane - direct signal passthrough. Will a U.2 drive fit in a SATA/SAS backplane, and will it get enough power to run, without the additional tab?
 
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BlueFox

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OCuLink is a physical interface that can support PCIe, SATA, etc. U.2 drives will not work with TQ backplanes at all. You need an NVMe specific model. They will have "N#" as a suffix in the model name.
 
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CyklonDX

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As i recall there is no 3u bpn-sas3-836X-nX backplane. (Only 2u and 4u units got it.)
 
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ere109

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BlueFox said:
OCuLink is a physical interface that can support PCIe, SATA, etc. U.2 drives will not work with TQ backplanes at all. You need an NVMe specific model. They will have "N#" as a suffix in the model name.
Click to expand...
Thanks. The motherboard manual only states PCIe x4 Gen 3, with no mention of SATA compatibility. I know that NVME runs on PCI-e x4. Any thughts on Oculink and SATA? Should it be stated in the BIOS somewhere?

CyklonDX said:
As i recall there is no 3u bpn-sas3-836X-nX backplane. (Only 2u and 4u units got it.)
Click to expand...
The 836 is an incredible chassis, and it seems like SM ignores it for the half-height 826 and the bulky 846. No love. In the same vein, they made a dual rear NVME for the 826, but not the 836.
 
CyklonDX

CyklonDX

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while it was great for homelab users, it has had little use in datacenters due to being uneven number and you always have even number of U's in your rack. *(not a big deal for a lot of datacenters, but in bigger ones - it is a big deal.)
 
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ere109

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To clarify my question: if I use a SATA breakout cable and plug the Oculink port into four TQ ports on my backplane, will it recognize a SATA or SAS drive, or is the Oculink interface useless in this scenario?
 
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BlueFox

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ere109 said:
To clarify my question: if I use a SATA breakout cable and plug the Oculink port into four TQ ports on my backplane, will it recognize a SATA or SAS drive, or is the Oculink interface useless in this scenario?
Click to expand...
On your motherboard, they are wired for PCIe only, so, no, that would not work.
 
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ere109

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i386 said:
The rear nvme kit sku: MCP-220-83609-0N

Kit installed in a 836b:
View attachment 43769
Connector/pins:
View attachment 43770
Click to expand...
That does look pretty... Thanks for the picture. I've already got a rear kit, so I'd have to waste that, but I'm curious. I'll bet they probably make a single unit that fits into the slim DVD bays up front... Hmmm...

One follow-up question, does that require both Oculink x4 connectors? My reading suggests that NVME can run on 2x, which could allow four drives on my two x4 ports... This would completely solve drive population.
 
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nexox

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ere109 said:
That does look pretty... Thanks for the picture. I've already got a rear kit, so I'd have to waste that, but I'm curious. I'll bet they probably make a single unit that fits into the slim DVD bays up front... Hmmm...

One follow-up question, does that require both Oculink x4 connectors? My reading suggests that NVME can run on 2x, which could allow four drives on my two x4 ports... This would completely solve drive population.
Click to expand...
You can sometimes find the backplanes by themselves, like this (which would require particular cables and likely only run PCIe 3.0): https://ebay.us/m/FYfdBv

As far as connecting two drives per port, most systems don't support x2x2 bifurcation, and the cabling would be pretty uncommon, so you would probably need a PCIe switch with an x4 or x8 upstream port and four x4 downstream ports.
 
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mattventura

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ere109 said:
One follow-up question, does that require both Oculink x4 connectors? My reading suggests that NVME can run on 2x, which could allow four drives on my two x4 ports... This would completely solve drive population.
Click to expand...
The motherboard/switch/hba would need to support bifurcating down to x2, which is pretty rare.
 
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