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Your cart is empty.4.5 out of 5 stars
- #110 in Computer Memory Card Adapters
Product Description
Juan Salinas
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2025
Using this with two enterprise U.2 Samsung SSDs for my Proxmox OS drive. Just had to setup bifurcation on the PCIe slot and Promox then recognized both drives and was able to use them for the OS and local storage.
Johann Smith
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2025
The U.2 to PCIe adapter works flawlessly! Installation was simple, and it performs exactly as expected without any issues. The build quality is solid, and it’s a reliable choice for adding U.2 drives to your setup. Highly recommended for a hassle-free experience!
Omar Assadi
Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2024
Pros:1. It works as it claims on the tin; I bifurcated a PCI-E x8 slot into x4x4, plugged two drives into the ports on the card, and slotted it into the system; everything was recognized without any issues.2. It comes with an included screwdriver plus 10 screws. Two are required for mounting the bracket to the card, but the other eight are exactly what you need for two U.2 drives.Contrary to other peoples' experiences, they were all the perfect length for my drives (Micron 9200 Max 2.4TB + a Toshiba/Kioxia drive I shouldn't name).3. This may be a con or a pro, but it comes with a low-profile bracket plus a full-size bracket. While it may sound like a pro, the current packaging does not come with either pre-installed, so you will need to fiddle with a few extra screws, and personally, with the size of the card, I don't think the LP bracket makes much sense.Cons/user-error:On the not-so-ideal plus user-error side, due to the vertical design of the card combined with a relatively high mounting position of the SFF-8639 / U.2 ports, the card is slightly larger than you might imagine.I glanced at the specs and did the rough math, but forgot to consider the height of the motherboard and slot itself. As a result, while the advertised dimensions clock slightly below the limit for a 3U chassis, you will be in trouble if you try using this in anything smaller than 4U or a full/larger-end-of-mid-size ATX chassis.This manufacturer could potentially adjust this in a future revision of the PCB by lowering the location of the ports on the card. But I suspect the position was chosen for signal integrity — the speeds of these cards may make it difficult to create something more compact without adding additional cost for PCB layers.If you're in a similar situation as I am, with a quirky Supermicro SC836 / CSE-836 3U or similar, you should look for alternatives. However, I haven't seen a significantly more compact vertical card yet, and space/thermal constraints would likely make mini-SAS to U.2 difficult if you're using the front internal bays especially.Horizontal cards may work, but ensure you have clearance on the slot itself; in my case, I am using the first slot of an X9DRi-LN4F+ since it is wired for x8 electrical, but the position of the DIMM slots would rule out that option.
Jim
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2024
Works fine with one but adding the second (with bifurcation on) did not work at all. YMMV.
Andrew
Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2024
Utilized this adapter card to slide in a U.2 NVME drive into my local server as a cache drive. It was recognized in Unraid and is working perfectly since install. Would recommend for you.
Ragnar
Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2024
Paired the single-port U2 adapter card with an Intel Optane 905. Works well, powered by the PCIe bus, no drivers needed of course. Card appears to have good build quality and design. Comes with suitable screws to mount the drive. Has a very small green activity LED that flashes at a fixed interval during periods of drive activity (does not flicker in proportion to actual IO).I do question the need for the SATA pass-thru connector, I mean who is going to plop a standard SATA drive on a card and take up a slot when you could just put it in a drive bay?
Sean
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2023
I tried installing two of these (4 drives total) on a supermicro epyc which allows bifurcation of the pcie lanes. I was only able to test with the 4 HGST SN100 drives I have and each adapter only recognized one drive regardless of bifurcation settings.Per the other review (also HGST drives) these will work with two drives IF the drives are not of the same model/brand. Unfortunately I don’t have any spare U.2 to test with.Ultimately went with a pcie x16 card(also 10gtek) and 4 8643 cables and everything is working great.
Priam
Reviewed in Singapore on March 7, 2023
I was not able to use it with 2 enterprise SSDs. The power limit of 75w was reached and the computer just shutdown. I am currently using it with only one SSD.It would be great if it had a SATA power plug to supplement the drive.
Brian Stretch
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2023
I wanted to run TrueNAS Core virtualized on my ESXi 8.0 U2 host. Supermicro H11SSL 1.0 board with Epyc 7351P. I installed four WD SN640 drives, dropped in the card, enabled IOMMU and set the slot to 4x4x4x4 bifurcation in the BIOS, set the drives to passthrough in ESXi, added them to the TrueNAS VM, set up a RAIDZ1 pool and... that's rather nifty. I gave 32GB RAM and 4 vCPUs to TrueNAS. Replicating from my old server to new over my 10Gb LAN pegged one of the vCPUs to 100%. The SN640s are relatively low power Gen 3 drives, perfect for this board. I didn't need the external power connector. My only complaint is that while a small screwdriver was included with the card a packet of screws wasn't but I had plenty on hand so no big deal. Sturdy card. Very pleased. If I had a use case for it I'd buy another card or two for ridiculous amounts of storage.
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