Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Holy Grail, Finally Found: U.2 to PCIe4 Adapters that Work!”.
Air, the rest of this video – you see, you must answer me, these questions, three. What is your name, I’m Wendell level, one. What is your quest? Well, I’m trying to use Enterprise ssds in desktop computers, because consumer ssds aren’t good enough for me. Okay, I mean they’re decent, but like this Intel p5800x pcie4, there is no other storage on the planet. That is faster period and you can still buy this. It’S just expensive.
What is the unladen airspeed velocity of the? I owe you ring transfer buffer, dma latency on the Intel or the AMD platform. Wait what what do you mean? Which platform so I may have finally completed that Quest. This Is the Gen Z, edsf, EDS, ff1c, u.2, cable, PCI, Express 4.0 length, 50 centimeters, that’s the first ingredient and the second ingredient is this: Bizarro land m.2 SSD, this SSD adapter thingy, looks more complicated than some m.2 ssds, but it is a glorified connector.
Oh yeah – and this is like a hundred dollars of stuff – please join our patreon or flow plane to help subsidize this Insanity, because I’ve bought so much stuff that doesn’t work. It’S insane they’re going to take away our pcie slots, I’m talking about the new generation. Z690. Z790 x670e there’s like one or two expansion slots beyond your GPU and they’re, not very good, but the m.2 are the pcie4 pcie5 got lanes for days, but our pcie slots.
Ah, you got two pcie 3.0 lines: motherboard designers. What are you thinking enthusiasts? Aren’T going to be able to put up with this? That’S Madness! So we’ve done videos in the past where we’ve crammed 10 gigabit Ethernet on m.2 and six SATA controllers and multiple mux things and a plx bridge and a slot breakout where you plug a card into an m.2. And then you have a pcie slot over here that you can plug other stuff into like a capture card. But this this is a pcie redriver for pcie 4 on an m.2 and there’s there’s quite a few components here and then we have the edsff Gen Z connector on the top here.
If you bought an old school optane like this uh saber Raven thing, which now apparently is worth fifteen hundred dollars, good Lord, it would come with a cable like this. This is a low profile, m.2, there’s a soldered connector here to u.2 that’s what this connector is called, and so you have these two and a half inch devices that are a little thicker than normal ssds. This is a form factor, that’s standard in the Enterprise, and so Intel is sort of double dipping. They’Re like okay, we’ve got a consumer version of our optane and we’ve got a regular desktop version of the optane which, by the way, these are on fire sale.
These first gen octane are on fire sale at Newegg check out my link below you. Should these are really good for ZFS pools. I’Ve done a bunch of videos on that. These are still really good for loading things.
I don’t really like the smaller capacity ones for desktop workloads anymore. You can use them with Primo cash for caching, but all that stuff I’ve covered in other videos check that out, but this is adapter. Cable is really what this video is about. This is a PCI, E3 adapter cable.
If you use this adapter cable with a pcie4 or even 5 drive, it’s not going to work, so the alternative was, you can get add-in cards like this now. This is a two slot. This will take a by eight interface and give you two by four, so you can hook up two u.2, and these were much better than cables, because the length of the wire that we’re talking about right there is this: it’s only about that. It’S only about as far as light can travel and a few billionths of a second. It mostly works, okay, except when it doesn’t with the level one. I mean these work for me as long as I put them in an upper slot in my trusty thread.
Ripper system, but if I put it in a lower slot on the motherboard, these don’t work quite as reliably, of course, with the level one community in the Forum there’s a lot of people in the community. I see you a Bavarian Normie flip good job uh that have had mixed success. Some people have bought nvme add-in cards such as the one from broadcom, but broadcom cannot get their act together. The firmware is a buggy mess.
If anybody from broadcom would like to reach out to me, I can give you reproducible test cases. The support has utterly failed on. Is everybody asleep at the wheel at broadcom? I don’t get it. I’Ve taken matters into my own hands release. What this video is about. My quest for the Holy Grail, in other words, and so this I’m happy to report, is something that works consistently and when it doesn’t work consistently, you can actually reprogram it by flipping tiny little switches on this m.2 card.
You see there’s two Banks here and it comes with this handy diagram. It doesn’t really explain what it does. That’S my job in this article there’s the diagram look at the close-up for the 50 centimeter cable and this m.2. So far, it has worked really well, not just with the p5800x from Intel, but also the Micron 9400 and some other Enterprise class ssds, such as the kyoxia cd8. Yes, the cd8 is an extremely high-end up and coming SSD from kyoxia. You would be hard-pressed to find a better all-rounder Enterprise class SSD and, unlike any consumer ssds, all of these ssds maintain their speed.
No matter how full it is, the drive is 90 percent full doesn’t matter if it’s rated for six gigabytes per second write speed, you will get six gigabytes per second write speed because it’s Enterprise grade and that’s why some of the Enterprise features sort of lag behind Their consumer counterparts sometimes to get the world record – you got to slam a bunch of Samsung, 980 or 990 Pros in a machine and a server run the thing and get the world record result. I mean and that’s unfortunate because Samsung oh they’ve really been on The Struggle Bus lately getting their firmware right in the consumer division as well. Anyway, you pick these up on AliExpress or Ebay. There’S the link below these work. Well, it has to do with the connector. The connector itself has to be rated for pcie 4 speeds. The PCB has to be rated for pcie 4 speeds. The dip switches have to be set appropriately for your motherboard for pcie 4 speeds. This is something that I’ve tested on z690 z790. The MSI Godlike motherboard, for example, got a lot of workout with this.
In almost all of its m.2 slots, the CPU connected pcie5 slot on my am5 motherboards, including the Tai Chi, the gigabyte, auris Master, the Asus hero motherboard and my MSI mortar b660, which has some other firmware issues not related to this. But hopefully MSI will get those fixed, pretty quick, it works and it works consistently across all those motherboards. We got a lot of motherboards here, a lot of motherboards you’re welcome.
So, if you’re into the Enterprise thing and have already bought a bunch of stuff that didn’t work, this one works, it almost works at pcie5 speeds. Yeah Samsung’s got some pcie5 ssds you got to fiddle with the jumpers. I think the weak spot, for that is my cable. I think this connector is similar to the connectors that are in servers that I have that are pcie5 that work with the Samsung pcie E5 SSD. But I think it’s down to my cable good news, though the Enterprise class Samsung pcie, E5 ssds, don’t benefit tremendously from the pcie5 interface, so at least right now for the pcie5 ssds on the market.
If you are that crazy, you can run them at pcie4 until we can get a better 100-ish dollar cabling solution, one of the things I’ve been working on, one of those things, that’s just been driving me crazy. Maybe this is something I should put on the level one store the level one text. You know insane person, pcie device interface kits because I imagine if I buy 100 of them at a time, the the cost would be a little bit less and I can sort of pass the savings on to you, because I mainly do this stuff as a passion Project, rather than a way to eat, hence patreon and flow play. Thank you patreon and flow plane subscribers for making this kind of Madness possible level. It’S a little bit level, one Diagnostic and a little bit window into the insanity, that’s sort of creeping in and what all this level one I’m signing out, and you find me the level one forums which is where I get some of my ideas for real stuff. Like this, and sometimes it takes me a while to find Solutions, but I will eventually [ Laughter ] foreign .