Asrock j3455-itx PCI Card msata Suggestion needed

Msata drives are not cheap, buy minipcie to 2x sata 3Gbps controller cards from aliexpress. Costs under $20

Zitat von FireFlower

Msata drives are not cheap, buy minipcie to 2x sata 3Gbps controller cards from aliexpress.

Wow, this is the weirdest thread I've ever seen. It gets even more weird

What should people do with a 'minipcie to 2x sata 3Gbps controller card' in contrast to mSATA? Should they insert it into a mSATA socket to be sure it will not work at all?

msata drive pricing is comparable to usb thumb drives, so I'm not sure why anyone would mess around with some goofy adapter to run a sata drive on an m.2 slot. Just use a sata port then.

@jollyrogr, because the motherboard he is talking about does not support msata a drive. it is keyed for wifi adapter.

@FireFlower, the board he is talking about does not support mPCIe drives. He would need PCIe 2.0 mPCI drive (link in my earlier post). they cost 5x normal msata drive.

As i understood the origins of this thread, it started out with a guy trying to figure out how to use a msata drive on a motherboard that didn't support it - obviously wants to use the 4 standard sata ports in a 4 drive case. A lot of noise in the thread, but summarizing the options for the specific motherboard in the thread;

1) USB 2.0 header DOM per the picture below - Internal Solution (my preferred solution)

2) PCIe 2.0 sata drive - Internal Solution (for specific motherboard)
https://www.digikey.com/produc…-ATM/1582-1251-ND/5452132

3) USB Stick - External Solution (tkaiser's preferred solution - as i understand it)

4) PCI express Adaptor - internal solution (but will be case dependent i.e. my mITX will not support it)

I think the external USB option gives the OP the best return on his investment.

it is roughly the same price, depending on the brand if you are comparing DOM vs USB Stick.
While you get to reuse the stick, and maybe less stuffing around to swap out the system drive,
i think in my case, there is more risk something will hit/knock the stick out of place.
Hence i rather the system drive physically protected inside the case. Horses for courses.

I missed the part where you had the msata already. glad you got it sorted and had a case that allows the card.

Glad to hear you got it figured out. Got to use the drive and get a bonus sata port

Zitat von gwaitsi

@FireFlower, the board he is talking about does not support mPCIe drives.

But @FireFlower was suggesting a mPCIe SATA adapter (ASM1062) providing 2 SATA ports. More or less what @Barricade bought but as PCIe and not mPCIe variant. And of course mPCIe cards do not work in mSATA slots* so the whole suggestions was a bit weird (like the rest of the thread )

To further add unnecessarily to the confusion: Most if not all mainboards have at least 1 USB2 port on pin headers. The necessary adapters to turn this into an internal USB port cost less than 2 bucks on Aliexpress (example) so it's almost always possible to use USB pendrives inside the enclosure (we usually combine USB3 pendrives from reputable sources -- that's SanDisk and Samsung -- on USB2 ports)

* Known exception: When using ARM devices like Solid-Run's Clearfog Boards mPCIe slots can be turned into mSATA and vice versa by configuring the bootloader. But AFAIK that's not a very common feature.

what he used is my point 4 above. and that is fine if you have a case that support a expansion card, but most nas cases do not. i.e. like mine.

In simple terms, as i said above; he wanted to use all his internal sata ports for data drives.
most cheap motherboards are 2 or 4 sata and most dedicated nas cases are two or four.
motherboards that have more than 4 sata are usually much more expensive than the 4 sata.

I have summarized 4 different options above, which includes (the option you suggested makes 5 options) what he used. I think that helps anyone with a similar challenge....so why are we still talking about it.

p.s. you don't get any additional value by having a USB3 drive on a USB2 port (the difference is transfer speed which the USB2 port can handle - so your pen drive is slower anyway).
So the internal cable you are suggesting would be a 5th option, but i don't know why anybody would want an additional 'thing' floating around inside the case. especially if it is a dedicated mITX NAS case like mine. I think the DOM is doing the same thing, much tidier, at the same price.....

Zitat von gwaitsi

what he used is my point 4 above

What he used was already known 6 weeks ago and exactly nothing has changed except the level of absurdity in this thread that still constantly increases

Zitat von gwaitsi

why are we still talking about it

Since this thread is so stuffed with confusion and that bizarre that we have to continue?

Zitat von gwaitsi

you don't get any additional value by having a USB3 drive on a USB2 port (the difference is transfer speed which the USB2 port can handle - so your pen drive is slower anyway).

Well, I really don't care about something called 'transfer speed' since this is completely irrelevant. Let me explain:

It's almost 2018 now. You don't want to buy any USB product any more that is USB2 only for the simple reason the risk getting old crap is way too high. Products advertised as 'USB2 only' can contain chipsets from last decade or even century urgently needing firmware updates or otherwise showing strange behaviour on modern hosts, you can get USB2 thumb drives showing sequential write speeds of less than 1 MB/s easily while their USB3 colleagues at least manage to retain 10 MB/s (after amount of writes exceeded the native capacity and those things slowing down a lot since none of these thumb drives supports TRIM). It just makes no sense to buy anything new that is USB2 only if you want to have somewhat decent performance.

What are the performance requirements for an OMV OS drive? Almost none, especially no high 'transfer speeds' (that's sequential IO) are needed but if there's a requirement it would be high random IO performance (and low latency). Again that's a good argument to use USB3 peripherals but does not mean you get any benefits from switching between Hi-Speed to SuperSpeed since interface speed is more or less irrelevant.

What does happen when you switch from Hi-Speed (wrongly called 'USB 2.0' with a 480 Mbps bus limitation that is in reality somewhat lower) to SuperSpeed (wrongly called 'USB 3.0' with a wrongly understood interface speed of 5000 Mbps -- SuperSpeed uses the rather inefficient 8b10b encoding so 10 bits on the wire can only transport 8 bits of data, you would need SuperSpeed Plus -- wrongly called 'USB 3.1' -- to get the more efficient 132b128b encoding wasting not 20% of the signal rate but just a little bit (4 bits wasted per every 128 bits transmitted). Sorry, again: What does happen if we switch from Hi- to SuperSpeed? Latency improves a lot (nice wrt random IO), theoretical sequential performance improves a lot (useless with all usual USB3 thumb drives) and reliability decreases a lot.

With SuperSpeed (SS) and type A ports we introduce USB3-A receptacle crappiness (the SS pins are separate and their surface area is laughable small compared to the Hi-Speed data line contacts) and also EMI troubles (insufficient shielding leading to data corruption on the wire, interference with 2.4GHz radios like Wi-Fi). We win almost nothing with a switch from Hi-Speed to SuperSpeed but enable a lot of error / data corruption possibilities (USB has some weak error correction mechanisms like CRC checks but in really weird situations you get not only tons of data retransmits totally ruining performance but also data corruption for sure).

That's why combining 'fast enough' (USB3 products) with 'reliable' (Hi-Speed and not SuperSpeed) makes a lot of sense and that's why combining USB3 thumb drives with USB2 ports is a great idea. You loose almost no performance* but win a lot wrt reliability.

i#m not talking about stupid benchmarks but real-world tasks like booting your OMV box. There are no real differences with eg. a quality SanDisk USB3 thumb drive connected to a USB2 or USB3 host port.

Zitat von tkaiser

But @FireFlower was suggesting a mPCIe SATA adapter (ASM1062) providing 2 SATA ports. More or less what @Barricade bought but as PCIe and not mPCIe variant. And of course mPCIe cards do not work in mSATA slots* so the whole suggestions was a bit weird (like the rest of the thread )
To further add unnecessarily to the confusion: Most if not all mainboards have at least 1 USB2 port on pin headers. The necessary adapters to turn this into an internal USB port cost less than 2 bucks on Aliexpress (example) so it's almost always possible to use USB pendrives inside the enclosure (we usually combine USB3 pendrives from reputable sources -- that's SanDisk and Samsung -- on USB2 ports)

* Known exception: When using ARM devices like Solid-Run's Clearfog Boards mPCIe slots can be turned into mSATA and vice versa by configuring the bootloader. But AFAIK that's not a very common feature.

don't work in msata ports? It is same slot, the support for it depends on motherboard is it automatic or manual selection to be sata port or pcie lane. My motherboard happens to support both, aswell did one generation older one from other manufacturer.

For example if you have unused wlan card slot you can just install this there and it should work without problems.

Link:
https://www.aliexpress.com/ite…Chip-6Gb/32723666873.html

Perhaps it was obvious but I didn't check OP's motherboard manual, mainly just saying there are options to be checked.

-----

Just read manual and it even doesn't have slot for wifi nor msata, so don't know how he figured installing one.. nor how to install minipcie to 2x sata ports host card either...

In this scenario they are adding a chip in between the mPCIe and the SATA.
can also be a good internal solution for mITX cases because it is only 3cm high.

I note they supply a driver, probably for windows, dis linux recognize it?

PCIe is not the same as M2 mSata. M2 are keyed differently for SSD and for wifi/bluetooth cards.
Most low end motherboards are only supporting wifi/bluetooth - as in the specific reference in this thread.

anyway, i think we are at 6 different possible solutions to skinning this cat now.

For my take on this particular one (but as always, its horses for courses). I don't see the value for a system drive.
The price of the adapter is the same as a DOM and then you have to had the price of a sata drive, unless you have a spare lying around.
The added advantage is you can get a 5th data drive (albeit not hot swappable).

i'm using the http://www.u-nas.com/product/nsc400.html case which is fantastic and supports the additional internal drive,
so your solution would work for me. But i went from a 120GB internal system drive to the 32G DOM because the drive was overkill and i wanted to re-use it on my linux desktop.
Currently my OMV + plex, openkm, webmin is using 20GB, so unless you have the spare drive lying around, i wouldn't recommend for cost reasons.

p.s. what mb do you have

In this scenario they are adding a chip in between the mPCIe and the SATA.
can also be a good internal solution for mITX cases because it is only 3cm high.

I note they supply a driver, probably for windows, dis linux recognize it?

PCIe is not the same as M2 mSata. M2 are keyed differently for SSD and for wifi/bluetooth cards.
Most low end motherboards are only supporting wifi/bluetooth - as in the specific reference in this thread.

anyway, i think we are at 6 different possible solutions to skinning this cat now.

For my take on this particular one (but as always, its horses for courses). I don't see the value for a system drive.
The price of the adapter is the same as a DOM and then you have to had the price of a sata drive, unless you have a spare lying around.
The added advantage is you can get a 5th data drive (albeit not hot swappable).

i'm using the http://www.u-nas.com/product/nsc400.html case which is fantastic and supports the additional internal drive,
so your solution would work for me. But i went from a 120GB internal system drive to the 32G DOM because the drive was overkill and i wanted to re-use it on my linux desktop.
Currently my OMV + plex, openkm, webmin is using 20GB, so unless you have the spare drive lying around, i wouldn't recommend for cost reasons.

p.s. what mb do you have

Zitat von gwaitsi

PCIe is not the same as M2 mSata

OMG. It continues

PCIe is not the same as SATA. M.2 slots use keying as a try to signal what's available but the keying is not unique and there are also vendors too dumb to use the right keying (eg. QNAP offering a product no one understands using M.2 M key slots while only SATA is available on the M.2 connector -- key B would be the right keying).

So it's really necessary to get the basics first (that's the protocol level -- PCIe vs SATA vs USB -- and then check the connector level later and then check what makes sense or not). When talking about mPCIe or M.2 it's also necessary to keep in mind that these standards allow for USB2 and USB3 so it becomes even more confusing since there exist also mPCIe cards that are USB only.

In the OP's case he used a PCIe SATA card providing one SATA and one mSATA slot. No mPCIe card on this planet will ever work in such a mSATA slot.

Zitat von tkaiser

OMG. It continues

the only one making this continue is you, having to have the last say and trying to prove to everyone you are the all knowing.

I never said sata was the same. i said "they are adding a chip" - as in to do the conversion. which also involves a voltage conversion.

Considering the core issue was;
how to use 4 sata slots on a motherboard as data drives, and provide additionally a system drive (which is what this whole thread boils down to),

There are now 6 different solutions to the issue with rationals from all on how/why they used their specific solutions. So why further distract from the solutions.
Better you write a blog or a book with the amount of text you generate.

Zitat von FireFlower

Just read manual and it even doesn't have slot for wifi nor msata, so don't know how he figured installing one

That's why I call this thread the most weird one I've ever encountered. @Barricade clearly described what he was searching for (a PCIe card he could use his already existing mSATA SSD with) and also shortly after sent another post where he described his solution (an ASM1061 PCIe card with one SATA and one mSATA slot). Problem solved in post #4 of this thread and thankfully the solution documented.

And only after this the madness started. It's somewhat amusing which levels of confusion are possible especially when constantly everything is mixed up (SATA and PCIe are protocols while mPCIe, mSATA or M.2 are only connector types allowing to route one or more paris of data lines for various protocols to the connector). Same with USB BTW...

Zitat von Barricade

which fullfill all my requirements and I'm very happy .

Wow, very confusing thread. But at last the issue was resolved for you which means it is possible to boot from a PCIe card on this Mobo.

Did you change anything in the BIOS in order to boot from the PCIe card ?

I have the same Mobo and added a PCIe Sata card in order to boot from a 2.5" SSD drive, so I can leave the 4 onboard Sata ports for the storage.

BUT, it didn't work. I can't even see the SSD when I enter the BIOS or hit F11 to chose which drive I want to boot from.

The PCIe card is OK, I was able to boot from this PCIe card using the exact same SSD drive on an older PC I have, but not from this one.