U.2 port compatibility

[merve04]

Does anyone here have experience with intel based motherboards that may include 1 or 2 U.2 ports on them? Does it work? Is it possible to use SAS breakout cables to get 4 sata hdds per port?

thanks in advance. 

[flyride]

U.2 does not break out to SATA.  You may be confusing SFF-8087 multi-SAS port with U.2

 

U.2 is basically a PCIe port like a M.2 NVMe slot is a PCIe port.  There is no way to connect SATA directly to the PCIe bus.  I have heard of an embedded SAS/SATA controller with a U.2 interface at one end and a SAS/SATA breakout at the other.  This would appear as a SATA controller to DSM, and as long as it was compatible with the standard SATA driver, it should work.

 

The only way I know of to get U.2 ports (and U.2 drives) to work is with ESXi (I actually have two U.2 drives mirrored on my main XPenology system) via physical RDM.

 

Edited September 20, 2019 by flyride