Hair brained tomfoolery of the worst kind

[N3M0]

Morning all. I'm looking for a way to run a number of m.2 nvme drives through my 4 SATA3 ports. In an ideal world this would look like 4 SATA3 cables running from my motherboard to a daughter board with 4 or more m.2 m key ports. Thoughts? 

[Spotty]

What you're trying to do won't work. NVMe uses PCIe not SATA. You can buy PCIe cards with 4x M.2 NVMe slots on them if you need additional M.2 NVMe slots.

[Eigenvektor]

Even if there's an adapter to do that, you'd lose a ton of performance, so why would you?

 

SATA 3 is limited to 6 Gbps, while PCIe 3.0 x4 has 32 Gbps (i.e. 4 GB/s). Your typical PCIe 3.0 NVMe will go up to 3.5 GB/s read speed. With SATA 3 the best you could hope for is around 550 MB/s. If that's good enough for you, just get SATA drives instead of buying an NVMe only to cripple its performance.

[thevictor390]

There are plenty of cheap converters on Amazon. As others said, you'll lose speed, but if you just need basic functionality for data recovery or something it should work fine.

 

EDIT: Based on user reviews these adapters seem to by lying about NVME compatibility

[Blue4130]

1 minute ago, thevictor390 said:

There are plenty of cheap converters on Amazon. As others said, you'll lose speed, but if you just need basic functionality for data recovery or something it should work fine.

There are not converters for nvme drives to sata motherboard ports.

[thevictor390]

3 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

There are not converters for nvme drives to sata motherboard ports.

There are some that claim to be but user reviews indicate they do not work.

[N3M0]

thank you all, the responces helped a ton. ill be running pcie extensions or 2.5 in drives depending on what looks better

[N3M0]

11 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

Even if there's an adapter to do that, you'd lose a ton of performance, so why would you?

 

SATA 3 is limited to 6 Gbps, while PCIe 3.0 x4 has 32 Gbps (i.e. 4 GB/s). Your typical PCIe 3.0 NVMe will go up to 3.5 GB/s read speed. With SATA 3 the best you could hope for is around 550 MB/s. If that's good enough for you, just get SATA drives instead of buying an NVMe only to cripple its performance.

my hope was to find a way to combine the 3 gbps of 4 sata 3 cables to get a 24 gbps or 3 GBps connection to a pack of nvmes. still not full power but my for my b550 ud ac board im limited on options. i have 4x pcie 3x1 through the chipset, and my dedicated m.2 ports are consumed with drives already. I do have a m.2 wifi card i dont use, is there a tool to convert that from wifi key to nvme key (m key?)

[kokosnh]

24 minutes ago, N3M0 said:

b550 ud ac

gigabyte one? 
Why not just use the PCIe to M.2 adapters? 

[N3M0]

1 hour ago, kokosnh said:

gigabyte one? 
Why not just use the PCIe to M.2 adapters? 

those limit me to about 850MB/s tested. theyre just pcie 3x1. the theoretical max of the 4 sata 3 ports would be 3GB/s

[kokosnh]

31 minutes ago, N3M0 said:

those limit me to about 850MB/s tested. theyre just pcie 3x1. the theoretical max of the 4 sata 3 ports would be 3GB/s

Yes, but you can't use them.
There's no active adapter from AHCI to NVMe, that I'm aware. 


But some boards on B550 with 3/4 M.2 ports, do share the PCIe lanes that SATA ports are using (so when you populat M.2 slot with SSD, 2 x SATA ports are disable, and the M.2 is running in PCIE 3.0 x 2) so they use the PCIe lanes the SATA controller would be using, to run the SATA ports.  
 

1 hour ago, N3M0 said:

I do have a m.2 wifi card i dont use, is there a tool to convert that from wifi key to nvme key (m key?)

Yes, but it's meaningless, as it's also only PCIe 3.0 x1

 

 

40 minutes ago, N3M0 said:

those limit me to about 850MB/s tested. 

That's the best you can do on this board. 
Just use cheap PCIe x1 to M.2 adapters, and run the SSD on PCIe 3.0 x1 speed.

[N3M0]

29 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

Yes, but you can't use them.
There's no active adapter from AHCI to NVMe, that I'm aware. 


But some boards on B550 with 3/4 M.2 ports, do share the PCIe lanes that SATA ports are using (so when you populat M.2 slot with SSD, 2 x SATA ports are disable, and the M.2 is running in PCIE 3.0 x 2) so they use the PCIe lanes the SATA controller would be using, to run the SATA ports.  
 

Yes, but it's meaningless, as it's also only PCIe 3.0 x1

 

 

That's the best you can do on this board. 
Just use cheap PCIe x1 to M.2 adapters, and run the SSD on PCIe 3.0 x1 speed.

Sweet, I appreciate you looking over this. I'll run pcie3x1 risers for my storage needs. Are you aware of an adapter from the m.2 wifi to either Ethernet or m key? Or anything else that would plug into the WiFi m.2?

[kokosnh]

https://pl.aliexpress.com/item/1005004711422885.html
 

but i would use PCIe and PCIe x1 to M.2 adapters