News MSI reveals M.2 to Turbo Mini-SAS card

Seems kind of odd... I have no idea why someone wouldn't just use an m.2 drive? No cables needed, no space wasted and same performance. But I guess people use msata to sata adapters too so... whatever.
SFF-8639 is absolutely an improvement over the sataexpress connector though... hopefully board makers will start using SFF instead going forward. sataexpress already seemed like a dead end to me the first time I saw it. I've also long wondered why more motherboard makers don't use SFF-8087 as 3 of those is much cleaner on the motherboard than 12 sata ports.

 

If you need SSDs larger than ~512GB, M.2 becomes extremely impractical, so you have to go up either to HH PCIe or 2.5", both of which have more to do with servers (where having them use the same bay as normal 2.5"/3.5" HDDs is quite practical from a maintenance perspective) than home machines at the moment.

The 1.6TB Samsung XS1715 and 1.6TB Intel P3700 come to mind as being such drives. Due to the sheer amount of NAND packages both have, and associated heat (the Samsung SM951 overheats and throttles, in comparison), even the super long M2110 (M.2, 110mm long) isn't long enough or have enough airflow and surface area to contain and cool all the chips, so you have to go up to the PCIe 4x HH/HL or 2.5" SFF-8639 form factors.

EDIT: On why SFF-8087 isn't used.. I have no idea. I also wish it were more widespread outside of servers and HBA/RAID cards.

 

Also why we don't just use SAS everywhere instead of keep seggregating desktop/server which is nonsensical. There is no inherent cost difference in SAS vs SATA. They are just means to transfer bits from the disk to the computer.
SAS is using SCSI command set while SATA is using ATA command set. That is the only difference.
And SCSI has always been better and more versatile.

 

Yeah they did something similar with PCI, PCI-X, AGP and AGP Pro/50 cards, when PCIe arrived.

 

PCI-E for ultimate server performance storage, SFF-8639 for normal servers, workstations and high end desktops, M.2 for cheap desktops and laptops is the future.

Everything else should just be phased out.

 

Not quite: Given PCIe and SFF-8639 are the same thing down to the electrical layer, they will both be used in servers.

SFF-8639 likely being more popular for use in general purpose servers (opposed to the hyper-specialised stuff the likes of Google and Amazon use, where they'll be using custom (physical) interfaces anyways in all likelyhood) because of the ability to have them in neat hot-swap bays interchangeably with classic SAS and SATA drives thanks to some clever muxing with the right motherboards/expanders.

 

Whatever came of this! cos now I need one? Converting a build into a 24/7 UnRaid based PLEX/+other mini server. I wanna use one of these to connect up the best part of two drive caddys whilst leaving the PCIX slot free for a transcoding workhorse.

J.

 

There are several on the market under the name 'm.2 to u.2 converter' or similar.

 

turned out it wasn't what I thought it was... I'm looking for an M2 card that has a SAS controller on it enabling me to attached 8+ drives through that 4x PCI interface.

J.

 

Bodge option: m.2 to PCIe-slot adapter, then stick your SAS controller card in that.

 

Plan A is to use an ITX board with a GPU but still, have SAS functions. previously I'd intended to use an APU and buy a PCI SAS controller. I'm still hopefull I'll find an M2 based SAS controller card.

J.

 

If your ITX board supports PCIe Bifurcation, you can have your cake and eat it: split the x16 slot to two x8 slots for a GPU and a SAS card at the same time.