nvme to 12g SAS 2.5" enclosure?

[pillagenburn]

I just got a Cisco 12g sas controller and am curious if these exist. I know these exist to adapt NVME to SATA-3 but I figure (especially with PCI-E 4.0 12g sas adapters out there) something like this would be a great way to really saturate the bus. Does anyone know of anything like this out there or is this something that's even remotely interesting?

I look at the cost of the average 12g sas drive and thought this would be a good alternative (assuming it exists).

this would saturate the bus without the use of PCI-E bifurcation..... and would probably even fit in a 7mm bay.

 

[lilfiend]

I think you can get U.2 SFF-8643 to M.2 adapters, is that kinda what you're asking for?

 

[lopoetve]

I'm confused what you're trying to do?

 

[pillagenburn]

I think you can get U.2 SFF-8643 to M.2 adapters, is that kinda what you're asking for?

Those u.2 adapters won't work in a 12g SAS port unfortunately.

I'm confused what you're trying to do?

So normally with nvme drives you're limited in the number of drives that you can plug in by available PCI-E lanes/ports and potentially your motherboard's support for PCI-E bifurcation etc. If you want lots of faster nvme drives plugged into your system you're forced to get extremely expensive controller cards or look into 2.5" drive bay adapters. The problem is that with the 2.5" drive bay adapters, they traditionally only support sata-3 (6gb/s) at best.

What I'm looking for is a 2.5" drive bay adapter for a NVME drive that supports SAS-3 (12gb/s).... which, in terms of bandwidth, should fit well with PCI-E 3.0 drives. Additionally, PCI-E 4.0 12g SAS cards are available and will eventually come down in price.... so for a PCI-E 4.0 x8 SAS controller we're talking big bandwidth

a single 12g sas drive fits roughly into 1.5 channels of PCI-E 3.0 so it seems like it would size pretty well.

 

[lopoetve]

You’re asking for something nonsensical. NVMe is a protocol - one designed for accessing flash media. SAS is a modification of SCSI, a completely different protocol - that can talk to almost any media (it’s a bus protocol- you can be writing tattoos on a dogs ass as long as Mr Fluffy spits back data on a READ10). Asking to attach an NVMe drive to a SAS adapter is plugging Mr Fluffy into your cpu - Threadripper might rip threads, but it doesn’t work on dog hair.

In short.

In long- still doesn’t work. The sas adapters are an actual controller for converting read requests (translated through a driver stack and transmitted over the PCIE bus) to SCSI or SATA commands vs a native drive that uses PCIE as a transport layer. It,.. just doesn’t work like that.

 

[lopoetve]

I can go way deeper if you need more understanding. Your bay adapters are an actual SATA controller that hooks up to the PCIEx4 slot that NVMe uses

 

[D-EJ915]

like they said you'll have to get some SAS ssds instead if you want to use your card or shell out money for a tri-mode card with a pcie switch on it and get a corresponding nvme cage/backplane to go with it.