I heard someone said the  Broadcom LSI 9400-16i  can be run without 4x4x4x4 mode as its on the controller itself. my mobo can max do 8x8. 

The 9400-16i is an x8 PCIe device, no bifurcation needed, and if you use it with x4/x4 it would be limiting the HBA, obviously if you use it with 4 NVMe devices the bandwidth will be shared by all.

2 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

The 9400-16i is an x8 PCIe device, no bifurcation needed, and if you use it with x4/x4 it would be limiting the HBA, obviously if you use it with 4 NVMe devices the bandwidth will be shared by all.

 

And what about the 9500?

 

 

Edited July 14, 20233 yr by Aumoenoav

In general the 9500 is the officialy supported, but the 9400 is much cheaper.

 

It will host the following

 

8x M2

4x U2

12x Regular HDD with a 12gbps SAS backplate

10 minutes ago, Aumoenoav said:

And what about the 9500?

It's also x8, but PCIe 4.0, you can see all the specs in the Broadcom site.

6 hours ago, JorgeB said:

It's also x8, but PCIe 4.0, you can see all the specs in the Broadcom site.

 

Yeah so I think I have been looking wrong all along and I dont need a 4x4x4x4 motherboard. The only issue I have now is that its only two ports on those cards. Can you guys help me understand how I can fill up the following ports

 

3x SFF8643 (3 12g SAS plates with 4 HDD each, regular drives)

8 x OCuLink SFF-8612, no Tri-mode support (NVME)

4 x OCuLink SFF-8612 4i (U.2)

 

I was planning to land on this cards

1x Broadcom 9400-16i i or Broadcom 9500-16i i (for the tri-mode units)

1x CEACENT CNS44PE16 Quad Port SFF8654(x8) PCIe 3.0 x16 NVMe U.2 Adapter Card through SFF8654 to 2xSFF8643 cable (for the NVME units)

 

The next version of the NVME box will support tri-mode, but not sure if its possible to run 8 more ports through the 9400 or 9500).

 

Can someone help me understand how this will be plugged into the drives since its just two outputs on the broadcom, but I need 3x sff8643 and 4x sff-8612, and on the other card I need 8x sff-8612

 

 

13 hours ago, Aumoenoav said:

its only two ports on those cards.

16i have 4 ports, but you cannot connect all that, each port can connect 4 SATA/SAS devices (16 total) or 2 NVMe devices (8 total), I believe you can also mix, for example use two ports for SATA/SAS and 2 ports for NVMe giving you up to 8 disks and up to 4 NVMe devices per controller. For SATA/SAS you could also connect one or two ports to a SAS expander to be bale to use more devices.

 

Also need the appropriate cables:

https://docs.broadcom.com/docs/12354774