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Use M.2 E-Key to mini PCI-E adapter?


indyslim

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Hi, I have a 1.04/918+ install working very well on a AsRock J4105-ITX system. The board only has 4 SATA ports and one PCIx2 expansion slot.

However, there is also an M.2 E-Key slot meant for Wifi/BT. My NAS is plugged in via ethernet and i will never use the M.2 slot for wifi. 

 

My question is whether anyone has used a M.2 E-key to miniPCI-E adapter? I would like to use that for SSD cache disk instead of using one of the 4 SATA ports. 

 

 

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https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_62848/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en

https://www.amazon.de/BQLZR-mPCIe-Converter-Adapter-Support/dp/B01303HFCE/

 

but i'm not so sure if thats the best choice, bringing it to a m.2 nvme type (M or B+M) with just 2 pcie lanes usable would you enable to have a 5 port jmb585 m.2 card (i use one in my normal nas with 3 disks and its working reliable so far)

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  • 2 months later...

Hello everyone,

 

I recently bought an Asrock J4105-ITX board and I installed XPENOLOGY using DS918+ configuration on it. In order to set-up two SATA SSD as cache for my HD, I also procured an IOCREST IO-ADA58215 E-key M.2 2-ports sata card (http://iocrest.com/index.php?id=2275): this card using the E-Key M2 wifi socket is recognized by XPENOLOGY, but when I test the speed (using SSH and the HDPARM command) of my two SATA SDDs, I only get "half" of the speed that I used to get with a "standard" SATA port. Is it normal ?

 

This extension card is using a JMB582 chipset that is supposed to deliver full speed for two SATA: I would be grateful to get your point about my configuration.

 

Thank you in advance,

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1 hour ago, pkdick1 said:

, but when I test the speed (using SSH and the HDPARM command) of my two SATA SDDs, I only get "half" of the speed that I used to get with a "standard" SATA port. Is it normal ?

 

yes

 

 

Quote

 

This extension card is using a JMB582 chipset that is supposed to deliver full speed for two SATA: I would be grateful to get your point about my configuration.

 

if you read the spec of the chip then you might recognize that in comparison to its bigger brother (JMB585) it only uses ONE pcei lane

https://www.jmicron.com/products/list/15

 

and you chipset limits you to pcie 2.0

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/128989/intel-celeron-j4105-processor-4m-cache-up-to-2-50-ghz.html

 

so you fall back to 500MB/s (one lane pcie 2.0) and both disks need to share, so 250MB/s per disk would be normal, but imho thats ok  as classic hdd's are most of the time ok with that speed, i think only a few disks will exceed that under some conditions (huge file read/write linear), most of the time its enough

 

there is a simmilar M.2 controller with JMB585 and 5 ports using two lanes but i  would not use that, i have one and it never worked reliable even with a mounted heatsink, the two jmb585 pcie cards i use work fine

so i'd suggest using a M.2 to PCIe adapter with a cable to the pcie slot and a jmb585 pcie card (pcie 4x connector but only a two lane card), that way you could use two lanes - if your board vendor connected thsi much to M.2 (you need to check first), there are different modes the lanes can be used (1x4 + 1x2 or 4x1 or 2x1+1x2 + 1x2)

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/35882-new-sataahci-cards-with-more-then-4-ports-and-no-sata-multiplexer/

(lower section in 1st post for the M.2 adapter)

 

i had no time to test this M.2 adapter as my hardware with M.2 is in use for my active systems (main and backup) so it would need to take out at least the backup and fiddling on its hardware (the system is really crammed and working with a M.2 would be a pain)

 

Edited by IG-88
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Dear IG-88,

 

I just replaced one of the SSD that I had initally connected to my IOCREST IO-ADA58215 E-key M.2 2-ports sata card with a Samsung 860 EVO 250 Gb SSD and to my surprise, I could see that the new SSD's speed was measured to 429 MB/s (I enclosed the Docker diskpeed software result) !

 

It therefore seems that there are some concerns with my "old" SSDs:

  • The crucial 128GB that I replaced (PN: CTFDDAC128MAG SN10160000EF08),
  • The Samsung 840 Pro 256GB that I kept whose normal reading speed is around 540 MB/s and here limited to 270 MB/s.

Could it be some "cache" limitations associated to my old SSDs ? I have no clue to explain this result.

 

Best regards,

 

 

Capture d’écran (28).png

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with our ASROCK J4150-ITX the pcie spec is only 2.0 and afaik its just one pcie lane that is used so its 500MB/s  and both ports need to share this bandwidth, so it needs to be sure that only one drive handles data and the other is not - but thats just about whats possible in theory, when both are active in cache(raid mode they share and that will limit the speed

you can check dmesg log about hte connection speed it uses per disk, maybe its only 3GBit for one disk because of protocol problems?

 

i'd suggest connection ssd's to the onboard sata and normal disk to the added m.2 card

 

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51 minutes ago, pkdick1 said:

I eventually found that my concern was due to a connector malfunctioning: when I replaced one SATA cable with a new one, the speed of my other SSD rise to more than 400 MB/s.

still, for best performance the ssd's are best served on the chipset's sata ports, normal HDD's are less likely effected by the limit of the one pcie 2.0 lane

(on the other hand you might not see much difference in IRL because the 1GbE nic limits the speed of data from/to SSD to the seed of the network, ~112MB/s and the ssd's sharing a 500MB/s bandwidth will not kick in as a limit as you can't deliver data fast enough to recognize it

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  • 1 year later...
On 11/14/2020 at 11:13 AM, pkdick1 said:

Dear IG-88,

 

I just replaced one of the SSD that I had initally connected to my IOCREST IO-ADA58215 E-key M.2 2-ports sata card with a Samsung 860 EVO 250 Gb SSD and to my surprise, I could see that the new SSD's speed was measured to 429 MB/s (I enclosed the Docker diskpeed software result) !

 

It therefore seems that there are some concerns with my "old" SSDs:

  • The crucial 128GB that I replaced (PN: CTFDDAC128MAG SN10160000EF08),
  • The Samsung 840 Pro 256GB that I kept whose normal reading speed is around 540 MB/s and here limited to 270 MB/s.

Could it be some "cache" limitations associated to my old SSDs ? I have no clue to explain this result.

 

Best regards,

 

 

Capture d’écran (28).png

Hey @pkdick1, can you tell me how you configure docker in synology to make diskspeed work? Can you share the configuration file and if it needs other packages installed? Thanks

Edited by ed_co
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Hi ed_co,

 

The only thing I did is (after Diskspeed docker download from JBartlet777 repository) I selected "High Privileges" in "General" Tab, Same network in "ports" Tab (sorry my config is in French and I do not know the exact English translation). I connect to Diskspeed using : http://IP_NAS:8888.

 

I hope this data will be useful to you.

 

Best regards,

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6 hours ago, pkdick1 said:

Hi ed_co,

 

The only thing I did is (after Diskspeed docker download from JBartlet777 repository) I selected "High Privileges" in "General" Tab, Same network in "ports" Tab (sorry my config is in French and I do not know the exact English translation). I connect to Diskspeed using : http://IP_NAS:8888.

 

I hope this data will be useful to you.

 

Best regards,

So, you are not using any temporary folder, to store the database or whatever? everytime you run it you have to detect and start from scratch?

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44 minutes ago, ed_co said:

So, you are not using any temporary folder, to store the database or whatever? everytime you run it you have to detect and start from scratch?

If you want to preserve the data, map any folder of your nas to "/tmp/DiskSpeed" of the container

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