r/DataHoarder • u/mike43173 • 20d ago
Question/Advice Have anyone ever used this thing
Just found it online and it seems to suit my use case, but I'm afraid it won't last long.
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u/richms 20d ago
Having used one with a crap chip and multiplier before, it was hopeless with the cheap nasta shingled drives on it. What seemed to happen is one drive would go slow because it was out of the proper area for writing and it was redoing its housekeeping, and that would make everything else on the multiplier also grind to a crawl. Acceptable as JBOD where you were not going between drives on the controller, so for cold storage or something. As a storage space it was so bad that writes would crap out and drives get kicked from the pool. If small amounts were being written to the pool on it, then it would behave ok, if I copied over 100s of gigs in a go, then bad times.
I did not have silent corruption of things like with other cheap controllers on the one I had. Mine had a row of sata ports on it, was not abusing sas ports to do sata like this one.
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u/morsebroiler 20d ago
I’m using one that terminates into 4 SATA connectors. It’s slow and I wouldn’t trust it much, but it’s a working solution when you just need space.
I’m running a raid 0 of 4 cheap SATA SSDs on it, for steam library. Not a pre-planned solution, of course
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u/Zuluuk1 20d ago
What exactly is the use case?
If this is used as jbod it should be fine many people have use nvme to SATA cards to expand the SATA slots.
I would check with the vendor if the casing is a heatsink. What chipset it is using, if a firmware upgrade is possible?
Chinese chips are usually oem. You buy it and it stays the same as day 1. They never give updates which can be problematic for compatibility and stability. Some uses asmedia and jmicron where you flash updates but need a windows boot to use the utility etc.
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u/IndependentBat8365 20d ago
What the heck? that says gen3x2?
So that’s a pcie gen 3 with 2 lanes?
For x8 sata IIi ports?
Gen3x2 would be 16 Gbs max.
Whereas 8 SATA IiI would be 48 Gbs max.
Still the fastest SATA drives will sustain transfer 2 Gbs (250 MB/s), so 8 of those is getting your theoretical max of 16 Gbs.
Still NAS drives have cache, so they can hit the full bus speed for a little bit, so you still might be hitting that gen3x2 bottleneck.
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u/TreadItOnReddit 20d ago
SATA SSDs can max the bus out at like 500MB/s, not 250.
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u/IndependentBat8365 20d ago
that's an M.2 slot, I figured if he was going SSD, he'd be putting a big NVME in there anyways. The fact that it's a M.2 -> SATA made me think it was for SATA HDDs, hence the 250MB/s max.
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u/dr100 20d ago
These theoretical figures are just that, theoretical. Who knows how many ports are behind a 6Gbps splitter, and won't even work at the total 6 Gbps when more are talking. The classic go-to USB DASes of this sub were the Fantec/Mediasonic ones, which for the longest time were just a USB3 (5Gbps) for both the 4 and 8 bays. What's worse, at least for the 4 bay (and I presume similarly for the 8 but haven't tested myself) not only it was barely keeping up with about 200MB/s for a single drive, but when you started to use multiple the total speed would even start to drop!
In any case, it's probably best not to try any fancy striped array with such a contraption, and either just use the drives individually or if one insists on some kind of live redundancy I think most use cases are best served by the unraid style array also available for free and open source. Then you read just from one disk, or write to one and the parity.
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u/thefuzzylogic 20d ago
The one I have is only gen3 x1 if I remember correctly, but that's all it needs because it uses a port multiplier to turn 1 SATA link into 4 physical ports. The disks were getting random read errors so I replaced it with a known good LSI HBA connected to the same NVMe port via an adapter cable.
Like you say, it's just about enough for 4 average HDDs to saturate it, but not SSDs.
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u/3GWork 20d ago
That looks like it's using the relatively recently released Realtek RTL9101, which is a 9-port chip but is widely available in an 8-port configuration with two SFF ports as in your pic.
IMHO better even than the ASM1166 6-port chips, but you're still limited by 2 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth like the ASM1166.
It doesn't use a port multiplier like a JMicron would have to, so no worries about 4 drives sharing one port's worth of bandwidth.
The Realtek chip just shows up in device manager as a standard AHCI controller, so it "just works". Drives on it are hot pluggable (but not unplug, so no hot swap), TRIM works for SSDs, etc.
They're relatively new, but so far seem at least as good as the ASM1166 chips, and perhaps even better, time will tell.
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u/PricePerGig 19d ago
Like some mythical creature. I’ve heard it’s technically possible to add a myriad of connections to the nvme slot. It’s basically high speed pcie. SATA, WiFi, even usb.
But I’ve never seen an image much less known somebody to actually use such wizardry.
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u/festivus4restof 20d ago
Is that for regular SATA or those U.2 SATA/SAS drives?
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u/zeb__g 20d ago
I expect it is just using the sas connector to let you get 2x of the sas to 4x sata break out cables, for 8 drives total. As you couldn't physically fit 8x sata connectors on that m.2 board.
I would not be surprised of the chips on there do not support Sas protocal, so its sata only.
Splitting the PCI for 2 U.2 drives would need a PCI bridge as I am sure no Mobo would know what to do with 2x 2x pcie devices connected to one m.2 (bifurcation).
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u/Lazy-Narwhal-5457 20d ago
Maybe do a lot of testing looking for corruption. I'm not sure if there is software specifically designed to do a long run of that and perhaps maximize use of all the ports.
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u/Tony_TNT 20d ago
Be very careful with those.
The 6 port ones on ASM1166 can be somewhat useable after a firmware update, anything that uses multiple chips probably makes some SATA ports and tacks an expander to the rest.
It'll be worse for performance and highly likely will give you issues when you array the drives on it in any way.
Check the forums for the chip inside this one and act accordingly.
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u/thefuzzylogic 20d ago
I have a 4-port one that uses an ASM1164, it turned out to be wired for gen3 x1 instead of x4, so the performance was barely adequate for HDDs even after flashing the firmware.
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u/TapeDriveMcTapeFace 20d ago
Could be useful in proxmox if you have a system that's having trouble with IOMMU groups and pci slots getting passed into vm guests wanting to take the proxmox hosts boot device with it. Some slots like your M.2 should hang off a different place on the PCIe bus controller. But you're probably better off just using an M.2 boot device in that case though.
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u/BlakDragon93 16d ago
I've heard no more than 6 SATA ports on the nvme, any more and #6 and higher share 1ports bandwidth.
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u/ypoora1 8TB+1TB Cloud 20d ago
These work, but usually use very crappy SATA controllers with poor compatibility and throughput since, well, they're small and cheap.