Question Is there an adaptor or cable for connecting a 2.5" SSD to a SATA M.2 slot?

[bit_user]

I have a 2.5" SATA SSD that I want to connect to a motherboard with a M.2 slot that has an AHCI/SATA mode. There should be some kind of cable for doing this, but the clostest thing I can find is NVMe cards that have an onboard SATA controller chip - that's not what I want!

Here's the background: There's a motherboard I'm looking at, for upgrading my fileserver. However, it only has enough SATA ports for the HDDs, leaving none for my 2.5" SATA boot/OS drive. Sure, I could buy a M.2 drive, for that purpose, but this is already adding up to more than I'd like to spend, so I'd really prefer to keep my existing drive and use some kind of cheap cable solution.

I burned some time searching on Newegg and Amazon, but no luck. Found a couple boards close to what I want, but not quite.

Thanks.

 

[bit_user]

Okay, I think this is basically it:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sintech-SA...085107?hash=item4b7269d2f3:g:7~YAAOSwBvNTmnjS

Can anyone find it cheaper? I don't need the cable, since I can just use an existing SATA cable and power from my PSU.

 

[bit_user]

Here are two more:

• https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XQ9MZIW/
• https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IAEEZ44/

 

[bit_user]

I was hoping they'd cost like half that much, but I guess they're too niche.

 

[popatim]

Double check that motherboards specifications; often using an M2 Sata drive will disable a normal Sata port (or two).

 

[bit_user]

Double check that motherboards specifications; often using an M2 Sata drive will disable a normal Sata port (or two).

I'm ahead of you on that. I already looked through the entire user manual of the motherboard, to see if any such restrictions were listed. I went so far as to look at the SATA BIOS settings, and the screenshots and docs give no indication of mutual-exclusivity.

However, as all of the ports are driven by the X470 chipset, I'll probably see what I can learn about its underlying capabilities.

In case anyone is curious, the motherboard is this:

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X470D4U2-2T​

They have another X470 board with 8x SATA ports (instead of 6), but it lacks the 2x 10-Gigabit LAN. They also have an X570 board with 8x SATA, but that's mini-ITX and my case is ATX. Plus, it's significantly more expensive and I don't want to lose PCIe slots.

 

[popatim]

it has 6 sata ports and two of them are in the M2 format. You're golden/good to go.
Thanks for the link.

 

[bit_user]

it has 6 sata ports and two of them are in the M2 format.

There are 6 physical SATA connectors on board, and then M2_2 (the second M.2 slot) "can accommodate either a M.2 SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module or a M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen 3 x2".

I'm finding conflicting info about the X470 chipset. Some places, it lists 6 SATA ports, in one place 8* (but I never found out what the * meant), and in one place 10.

It seems AMD didn't put out a lot of info about the X470 - most info I find is about the X570. Maybe I will look into the X370, since the X470 is supposed to be just a minor iteration on it.

I found this huge thread about the board: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/asrock-rack-x470d4u2-2t/147588

So far, no direct answer to that question.

Here's a review of the non-10G version:

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-x470d4u-review-amd-ryzen-meet-server/​

 

[popatim]

Newegg failed me! LoL

Storage Devices
SATA6 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s (1 x SATA DOM port)
SATA RAID0/1/10