Help with U.2

[UtahDeLorean]

I have a hardware issue (1st world one I know) that I hope someone would be able to help me out with.

I have a Threadripper 2950 on Asrock X399 with 4 PCIe slots that I can use. 1st is for a Video card for Transcoding, 2nd is my 10gig card, 3rd for my External SAS that's running my Disk Shelf, and the 4th one for HBA to run all 12 drives in my rack.

I was gifted 2 Dell Disk Shelf's that I would like to add to my server and I would like to add a 12gig external SAS card (since these drives are 12gig)

I thought that I would be able to utilize the onboard U.2 card. Thinking that I was being smart I purchased a breakout cable from amazon

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0912P8CS8?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

For some reason U.2 there is not a lot of documentation online about the U.2 port and after playing with it and trying to get it to work I have given up and wondering if someone has a solution. I just need to be able to move 4 drives onto another type of connection to get this to work.

If anyone has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

[JorgeB]

3 hours ago, UtahDeLorean said:

I thought that I would be able to utilize the onboard U.2 card. Thinking that I was being smart I purchased a breakout cable from amazon

That won't work, U.2 is a PCIe connection, you could directly connect for example a U.2 NVMe device, to connect STA devices you'd need to install a SATA controller using U.2 interface, not sure if they exist, they do exist in M.2 format, like this:

 

[UtahDeLorean]

4 hours ago, JorgeB said:

That won't work, U.2 is a PCIe connection, you could directly connect for example a U.2 NVMe device, to connect STA devices you'd need to install a SATA controller using U.2 interface, not sure if they exist, they do exist in M.2 format, like this:

 

 

This is what I was afraid of when it didn't work and I couldn't find any thing int he Bios. I have extra space in my Disk Shelf so I think that I am just going to move the drives and that should allow better airflow in my case. The plan is to RAID these other drives that are 10k rpm drives. So I am trying to find a 12g external SAS card to link these new Disk Shelf's into my server