4-Port mPCIe SATA Adapter

Question

I ordered one of these from Amazon Cablecc Mini PCI E PCI Express to 6Gbps Four Ports SATA 3 0 Adapter Converter Hard Drive Extension Card for SSD https a co d 2y9RUdi This is a full length 4 port SATA mPCIe card based on the ASM1064 chip We know that 2 port SATA half length cards based on the ASM1061 chip work fine on the TP2 The ASM1061 supports one PCIe Gen 2 lane with a maximum throughput of 500MB s The ASM1064 supports one PCIe Gen 3 lane with a maximum throughput of 1GB s The ASM1064 won t yield scalable performance for CM4s but it will take full advantage of the PCIe Gen 3 lane available to some Jetson SoMs and the RK1

terarex · Answer

The adapter is arriving today I ll do basic functionality tests on Jetson Orin NX 16GB and RPi CM4108000 I have two unused circa 2017 planar NAND SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB SATA SSDs Performance is representative with good enough endurance 80TBW for a SATA device If anyone would like fio raw sequential and random i o performance numbers at various blocksizes for the ASM1064 versus the built in ASM1061 controller on node3 let me know

terarex · Answer

The package Note no SATA cables so expect to order them separately

terarex · Answer

The card is recognized by Ubuntu on Orin NX 16GB in node1

terarex · Answer

The card is recognized by Ubuntu 64 bit 20 04 LTS on RPi CM4 in node2

terarex · Answer

I ll download the FIO source build it and do some performance tests if there is interest

_dhanos_ · Answer

Ubuntu will need `linux modules extra raspi` just in case you did not install it yet or someone seeing this will wonder why they do not see the drives ``` sudo apt install linux modules extra raspi ```

terarex · Answer

I mistakenly ordered a pair of SATA cables that had 90 plugs on both ends Ordered a different set that is 90 on one end and straight on the other These cables are necessary due to the way the 2 5 drives mount in the Thermaltake Tower 100 connector end down It looks cleaner because all SATA cables are hidden

terarex · Answer

Got everything cabled and installed tonight I don t like the SATA cable routing here These cables are 18 Not long enough to route them out of sight but this setup is better for switching between controllers and nodes I ve ordered 1 meter cables for permanent cable routing

terarex · Answer

Finished cabling with long SATA cables yesterday I ran RAW I O tests on one SSD attached to the embedded ASM1061 node3 to confirm functionality I don t expect anyone to use RAW I O in this setting I ll make one big EXT4 file system on each device and find the most appropriate fio ini test examples for SATA SSDs

terarex · Answer

The ASM1064 mPCIe card has solder points on the bottom This means you must either insulate the area or desolder and remove a standoff to prevent an electrical short

terarex · Answer

I m still researching compatible female female threaded M3 barrel standoffs to replace all of the factory M2 SMD standoffs

zsleyer · Answer

< terarex> Is there any kind of bottleneck on CM4 or would you recommend it anyway

terarex · Answer

The CM4 has 1 lane PCIe Gen 2 with a maximum bandwidth of 500MB sec The ASM1064 mPCIe card supports 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 max bandwidth 1GB sec If you intend to use SATA HDDs particularly if you don t have a purely sequential read workload the CM4 probably won t exceed the bandwidth If you want to use SATA SSDs and the workload is sequential read the CM4 may limit total performance

m0lok · Answer

I m planning using ssd and use longhorn to make mirrors for a k8s cluster shouldn t have problemas if I use this to add more disks to the cluster I don t expect super fast I O