Question NVME OVER PCIE SAS CARD

[jimes]

question please : now that nvme drives are faster -- would there be any performance gain on an old system with a sata 3 port but no m2 port -- if we used a PCIE SAS card with an nvme drive in a converter over a sata port connected to the SAS card?? would that have any gain at all ??

 

[Billy Tallis]

we used a PCIE SAS card with an nvme drive in a converter over a sata port connected to the SAS card

No such converters exist that I'm aware of, and such converters are largely impossible. There are a few tri-mode (SAS/SATA/NVMe) HBAs and RAID cards, but they generally use SFF-8643 connectors (Mini-SAS HD) to connect to U.2 drives, possibly through a passive backplane. There are no active converters that make a NVMe drive appear to the host system to be a SATA SSD using ATA commands, and nobody will ever make such an ASIC.

If you have a free PCIe slot, you can put a NVMe SSD in it, without involving SAS HBAs. Older systems won't be able to boot off such a drive, but that doesn't prevent an OS loaded elsewhere from using the drive.