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Amfeltec x16 PCIe with 4 SSDs: 5900+ MB/s

This card really is a very nice upgrade. It allows you to get speeds internally in the cMP that the nMP can't reach the same way.

I personally got it more for the space savings... being able to run the boot SSD and 3 other SSDs in RAID 0 all on one PCIe card has been amazing. And everything still runs at full speed, so my boot SSD at 1400MB/s and my RAID averages around 3500MB/s... perfect for a scratch drive or full media drive fore smaller projects.

Can't recommend it enough.
 
Just wanted to report that I got my card with 2 chips and am solid on 2.5gbs/sec
I was on the xp941 for the last 2 years and never saw anything like this.
2.5gbs was only ram performance just a few years ago.

These old (2010) mac pros have been such a good investment with regard to upgrades.
If only apple did not abandon these nice machines.
Through the years I have upgraded CPU's use raid cards, SSDs etc and now I feel like I got a brand new machine, the difference between even an SSD and the SM951 is night and day.
Eclipse will start in 2 seconds flat, loading a huge java web app will complete in one second rather than 15, developer heaven.
 

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Anyone know how to make this card seen as an internal rather than external drive? I am having issues installing/booting bootcamp on a separate drive, and I think having this card as my boot drive is the culprit.
 
fhturner said:
Hey, handheldgames, were you ever able to test the M.2-to-Apple adapters on the Squid board? Did 1TB blades interfere when adjacent to each other? Could you do 512GB + 1TB on a side w/o interference?
Click to expand...

the adapters are a tad bit too wide to fit two per side. on has to resort to slightly overlapping pcb's when placing an apple pcie ssd adjacent to a standard m.2 device. adding a level of torque and flex to the installation.

its unfortunate the sqid is compact in its design. a bit of pcb space would have gone a long way in m.2 device installation flexibility.

for an 08 cmp, the squid can easily host 2 m.2 devices and 2 x4 pcie 2.0 slots. whilst loosing 2 pcie 1.1, slots along the way, it offers an interesting configuration option.
 
Using the squid, when I installed OS X on it, it did give the warning that "some features are not supported, such as FileVault and recovery partition". From what I understand this is because it is an unsupported raid setup, which I think has an effect on bootcamp as well. Anyone know how to trick OS X into thinking its a different setup? A Kext or terminal command perhaps?

Thanks
 
hm i put my existing SM951 (used in Lycom, slot 4) in it and the disk speed test is now showing highly fluctuating rates stopping at around 500MB/s in rare cases (mostly 150~), nowhere near before....

Probably need to reset something, we'll see mhm
 
PowerMike G5 said:
This card really is a very nice upgrade. It allows you to get speeds internally in the cMP that the nMP can't reach the same way.

I personally got it more for the space savings... being able to run the boot SSD and 3 other SSDs in RAID 0 all on one PCIe card has been amazing. And everything still runs at full speed, so my boot SSD at 1400MB/s and my RAID averages around 3500MB/s... perfect for a scratch drive or full media drive fore smaller projects.

Can't recommend it enough.
Click to expand...


I have a related situation, a Win10 X58 machine with PCIe 2.0 + Samsung 950 Pro + SM951. I just got the 950 as a boot drive as the SM951 cannot boot on this mb; so now I have a spare M.2 drive, what to do? I am going to get another M.2 -> PCIe adapter card and sw RAID them. To solve the boot issue, I partitioned the 950 into a 64GB OS partition + 400+ GB second partion. I'll do the same on the SM951, and SW-RAID the 87.5%-of-capacity partitions to achieve an 800+GB drive with double the bandwidth.

Seems to me the same thing could be done with the Squid and four drives on a Mac, but can't say for sure. That would allow you to achieve maybe 5000 MB/s on your RAID drive while preserving bootability, with maybe a 25-33% capacity boost -- why not use all four drives instead of "wasting" one (whole one) just to meet boot compatibility requirements? Have your cake and eat it too...
 
Has anyone contacted our friends in China? Seems like they would have a 4-way board like this ready in 14 days for $80.

I think my adaptor for my 1TB SSUBX was like $12—and I was totally suckered into buying that… had I looked around I'm sure I could have gotten one for $10..........
 
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No matter what I do with this card, I can't get windows to run on any internal drives. Whenever the squid is installed, I get black screen and blinking cursor when starting windows. When I remove the squid, windows boots and/or installs fine... Something about the card is causing conflict with windows....Thoughts anyone?
 
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AndreeOnline said:
Has anyone contacted our friends in China? Seems like they would have a 4-way board like this ready in 14 days for $80.

I think my adaptor for my 1TB SSUBX was like $12—and I was totally suckered into buying that… had I looked around I'm sure I could have gotten one for $10..........
Click to expand...

It's not quite that simple; I've been researching this, and there are some twists.

The Squid board contains a PLX PCI-e bridge chip, which apparently can cost as much as $80/part. Considering this is almost certainly a small manufacturing run, the price isn't so surprising.

Supermicro however has a PCI-e expansion riser with a PLX chip that can take up to three PCI-e 3.0 daughter cards (which could all be cheap, low-profile M.2 -> PCI-e adaptors) that can be found for as little as $40 - $50 (so around $100-$140 fully populated). I assume they manufactured these in much larger quantities. Another company with a four-slot riser wants around $700/card, again probably a very low volume item.

There is however a potential cheap option. The PLX chip or equivalent functionality (called "PCI-e bifurcation" -- the ability to plug multiple PCI-e devices like M.2 drives into the same PCI-e slot and divide the lanes among them) can be built-in to the motherboard / chipset (and requires BIOS support if it is there). It often is present on server boards or high-end consumer / gamer boards (Crossfire / SLI multi-GPU setups often require this to allow the motherboard to redistribute PCI-e lanes among the slots).

If it is there, cheap passive risers / multi-M.2 boards become possible. Fujitsu has a dual-M.2 board for as little as $20, although I could only find this on sale in Europe. Two of these would only cost $40 for a 4-M.2-slot setup if your system supports it. I could imagine a four-way passive M.2 board otherwise like the Squid costing less than $80 even in small quantities. Just wouldn't be guaranteed to be universally compatible, like PLX-based boards are.
 
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mnmr said:
It's not quite that simple; I've been researching this, and there are some twists.


The Squid board contains a PLX PCI-e bridge chip, which apparently can cost as much as $80/part. Considering this is almost certainly a small manufacturing run, the price isn't so surprising.

Supermicro however has a PCI-e expansion riser with a PLX chip that can take up to three PCI-e 3.0 daughter cards (which could all be cheap, low-profile M.2 -> PCI-e adaptors) that can be found for as little as $40 - $50 (so around $100-$140 fully populated). I assume they manufactured these in much larger quantities. Another company with a four-slot riser wants around $700/card, again probably a very low volume item.

There is however a potential cheap option. The PLX chip or equivalent functionality (called "PCI-e bifurcation" -- the ability to plug multiple PCI-e devices like M.2 drives into the same PCI-e slot and divide the lanes among them) can be built-in to the motherboard / chipset (and requires BIOS support if it is there). It often is present on server boards or high-end consumer / gamer boards (Crossfire / SLI multi-GPU setups often require this to allow the motherboard to redistribute PCI-e lanes among the slots).

If it is there, cheap passive risers / multi-M.2 boards become possible. Fujitsu has a dual-M.2 board for as little as $20, although I could only find this on sale in Europe. Two of these would only cost $40 for a 4-M.2-slot setup if your system supports it. I could imagine a four-way passive M.2 board otherwise like the Squid costing less than $80 even in small quantities. Just wouldn't be guaranteed to be universally compatible, like PLX-based boards are.
Click to expand...

Regarding our friends in China.... ODM's were not interested as "market opportunity is too small and cost is too high".

M.2 / NGFF boards....
Dual M.2 boards usually feature multiple SATA device support OR One M-Key (pcie) and 1 B/M key for SATA M.2. While there are PCIe adapters featuring 2 M.2 M-Key slots, the only one I'm aware of requires a cable to attach to a second PCIe slot. There are not any Pcie x8 to qty. 2 x4 m.2 x4 m-key or pcie x4 to qty 2 m-key x2 adapters available. If there are, please share as the market changed daily.

400px-M2_Edge_Connector_Keying.svg.png
IMG_0858-640x425.jpg

(Four M.2 cards, from left to right: An A- and E-keyed Wi-Fi card, two B- and M-keyed SSDs, and an M-keyed SSD.)

FWIW.... Be careful of the superMicro Bitrufication board... It's a great concept - in theory - not practice!!! Over a year ago, plugging one of the aforementioned adapters in slot 2 with single pcie SSD, fried a a MP 4,1 (still makes great door stop) and the fan controller on a 680 GTX. The SSD, it's data and the rest of the kit hooked up the SATA II subsystem survived. Apparently the cMP is not setup for bitrufication.

Although... I greatly encourage any Nay Sayers to take the trip to candy mountain. :rolleyes:;):apple:




On a side note..
While this is an option with the Squid... The usefulness of this $80 toy is tbd.
PE4C-M4060A%20V4.1_1000.jpg
 
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handheldgames said:
Regarding our friends in China.... ODM's were not interested as "market opportunity is too small and cost is too high".

M.2 / NGFF boards....
Dual M.2 boards usually feature multiple SATA device support OR One M-Key (pcie) and 1 B/M key for SATA M.2. While there are PCIe adapters featuring 2 M.2 M-Key slots, the only one I'm aware of requires a cable to attach to a second PCIe slot. There are not any Pcie x8 to qty. 2 x4 m.2 x4 m-key or pcie x4 to qty 2 m-key x2 adapters available. If there are, please share as the market changed daily.

400px-M2_Edge_Connector_Keying.svg.png
IMG_0858-640x425.jpg

(Four M.2 cards, from left to right: An A- and E-keyed Wi-Fi card, two B- and M-keyed SSDs, and an M-keyed SSD.)

FWIW.... Be careful of the superMicro Bitrufication board... It's a great concept - in theory - not practice!!! Over a year ago, plugging one of the aforementioned adapters in slot 2 with single pcie SSD, fried a a MP 4,1 (still makes great door stop) and the fan controller on a 680 GTX. The SSD, it's data and the rest of the kit hooked up the SATA II subsystem survived. Apparently the cMP is not setup for bitrufication.

Although... I greatly encourage any Nay Sayers to take the trip to candy mountain. :rolleyes:;):apple:




On a side note..
While this is an option with the Squid... The usefulness of this $80 toy is tbd.
PE4C-M4060A%20V4.1_1000.jpg
Click to expand...
[doublepost=1474162655][/doublepost]That's too bad about the fried machine. However what is likely going on here is Supermicro is making custom usage of certain pins, in violation of the PCI-e standard, because they can (they only need it to work with their motherboards). Apparently it does work on some non-Supermicro mb's, but apparently also, it fries some others.

If it was a completely standards-compliant board, that relied on bifurcation, I would think it simply would not work on an mb w/o bifurcation support, or only the first M.2 slot (first set of 4 lanes) would be functional.
 
This is what Amfeltec says;
up to 2 any type M.2 PCI Express SSD modules (M.2 key M)

Of course the 950 pro will not work, but if you can find SM951 AHCI you're in business!
 
ShawnF said:
Thought I'd share this. Went to the Amfeltec website and saw they introduced more Gen 3 M.2 carrier boards. The two that caught my eye were the 2 slot and 4 slot boards. The slots seem wider now so maybe less spacing issues. Not sure if these support AHCI or NVME SSDs - my guess they are NVME only?

2 slot: http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-2-m-2-ssd-modules/
SKU-086-32-320x220.jpg


4 slot: http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-4-m-2-ssd-modules/
SKU-086-34-320x220.jpg
Click to expand...
Good, more interesting for the mp 1,1 than the previous 16 lanes card
 
handheldgames said:
On a side note..
While this is an option with the Squid... The usefulness of this $80 toy is tbd.
Click to expand...

Sweet, ordered 2 - let's see.

I have these and a LOT of cabling currently:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121912960082



ShawnF said:
Went to the Amfeltec website and saw they introduced more Gen 3 M.2 carrier boards. The two that caught my eye were the 2 slot and 4 slot boards. The slots seem wider now so maybe less spacing issues. Not sure if these support AHCI or NVME SSDs - my guess they are NVME only?
Click to expand...

After all this is just PLX again (likely a PEX8734 - 32 lanes @ max. 8 ports, 3.0) - The fan indicates a newer chip (the 7W TDP runs without though, the new HP cards use it also for 4 M.2 SSDs).

They should support NVMe just fine, however not in a Mac Pro/OSX - My old carrier board runs in a HP server now @ x16 2.0.

Amfeltec is on an event in Munich/DE these days and sent me an invitation; i'll see if i can attend though outside of PLX things they do not offer much interesting things to me.

AndreeOnline said:
Has anyone contacted our friends in China? Seems like they would have a 4-way board like this ready in 14 days for $80.
Click to expand...

You have interesting ideas what PLX/Avago charges these days for a PEX8734 and the 2.0 equivalent PEX8532 (hint: 80$ will *not* cut it).
 
OMG, I just priced these chips on mouser.com and now I understand why that squid costs so much.
Amfeltec isnt price gouging, they are just using a VERY expensive part on those boards.
 
Surrat said:
OMG, I just priced these chips on mouser.com and now I understand why that squid costs so much.
Amfeltec isnt price gouging, they are just using a VERY expensive part on those boards.
Click to expand...

75% that, 25% QTY -they are a small shop after all.

PLX/Avago until some weeks ago had a de-facto monopoly, now there is public competition but they focus on NVMe backplanes for servers as well (due to $$$) so not much to change.
 
William_si said:
cMP 5.1 Ultra Custom: Dual X5675, 90GB RAM, 2x R9 270X, 1x R9 280X, 1x RX480, 2 SM951 PCIe SSDs, SQUID M.2/NGFF carrier board, PCIe extension, external GPU attachment kit.
Click to expand...
WHOAH. Ultra custom, lol, not kidding. What's the PCIe extension? Do you happen to have pics of your build? Pretty relevant to this thread as it happens.
 
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