Question SATA port bonding ?

brcisna11

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Jun 5, 2020
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I searched and stangely enough could not find any solid info,,,up front.
Surely someone has tried SATA port bonding/ aggregation?
Seeing as how SATA is about obsoleted at this point, could there be some way to make an adapter to go from M.2 NVMe to 4 onboard SATA ports of a consumer grade motherboard to bond/aggregate the possible bandwidth?

Example
We have 4 desktop PCs scattered around the house. Each one has no SATA connection each with 4 SATA ports. They are pretty much just dust collectors at this point.
Seems like if you get 560 MBs per channel times 2, an NVMe drive would get decent performance.
Probably a "more trouble than it's worth" type deal in the end.

Flame suit on... Ideas?

TIA
 

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Searched and stangely enough could not find any solid info,,,up front.
Surely,,,someone has tried sata port bonding/ aggregation
Seeings how sata is about obsoleted at this point could there be some way to make an adapter to go from M.2 nvme to 4 onboard sata ports of a consmer grade motherboard,to bond/aggregate the possible bandwidth.

Example. We have 4 desktops,,scattered around the house,,each one has no sata connection each with 4 sata ports. They are pretty much just dust collectors at this point.
Seems like if you get 560 MBs per channel times 2 an nvme drive would get decent performance.
Probably more troubl than it is worth type deal in the end

Flame suit on... Ideas...

TIA
What storage do you propose connecting to this bonded port? There were motherboards which had special double-wide bonded SATA ports. Those ports never were widely supported and they are now obsolete. I believe the technology was called "SATA Express".
 

brcisna11

Reputable
Jun 5, 2020
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@kanewolf ,
Have never heard of this Sata Express, interesting.
I had mentioned in original message ,,the thought was to 'convert' a bonded sata port/controller into M.2 nvme (ssd),, to leverage the nvme throughput possibilities.
Am surprised someone much smarter than I,,hasnt tried frankensteining something like this just to see if it would work.
With all current mobo's doing M.2 nvme interfaces,,many x2 now,,,this idea is pretty unrealistic,,,in the end though.
After having had nvme for a few years now,, sitting an an sata ssd pc,,,is so stinkin slow,,,

TIA
 
@kanewolf ,
Have never heard of this Sata Express, interesting.
I had mentioned in original message ,,the thought was to 'convert' a bonded sata port/controller into M.2 nvme (ssd),, to leverage the nvme throughput possibilities.
Am surprised someone much smarter than I,,hasnt tried frankensteining something like this just to see if it would work.
With all current mobo's doing M.2 nvme interfaces,,many x2 now,,,this idea is pretty unrealistic,,,in the end though.
After having had nvme for a few years now,, sitting an an sata ssd pc,,,is so stinkin slow,,,

TIA
I've run this pc from a gen3x4 ssd and a sata ssd and see no diff in perf.

Other than benchmarks.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
There is nothing inherently wrong or lacking with current SATA III SSDs and the associated ports.
They are fine, for a wide variety of use cases.

My main system has 4x of these, along with the 2x NVMe drives.

There is no market for bonded/combined SATA ports.
 

Misgar

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Mar 2, 2023
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Have never heard of this Sata Express
I have an old Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H motherboard (not the one shown below) with one M.2 slot, four SATA ports and one SATA Express. I use the SATA Express port to control two ordinary SATA drives.

https://www.legitreviews.com/what-is-sata-express-and-why-it-matters_140093

sata-express-connector1.jpg


Whilst you're at it, check out SAS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

1920px-SFF-8484-internal-connector-0a.jpg


sitting an an sata ssd pc,,,is so stinkin slow,,,
What specific apps on your machines run much slower on SATA? As an experiment, clone the NVMe drive in your fastest PC on to a "slow" SATA SSD, then change the BIOS and boot from the SATA SSD. I doubt you'll see much difference in start up times. Check the boot times on both drives with BootRacer and report back.
https://greatis.com/bootracer/index.html

We have 4 desktops,,scattered around the house,,each one has no sata connection each with 4 sata ports. They are pretty much just dust collectors at this point.
If you don't use available SATA ports, that's up to you. I hang multi-Terabyte hard disks off my SATA ports for extra storage. I have some old boards with 8 or 10 SATA ports and they're all used. On this PC, I've got three M.2 NVMe drives, five hard disks and a BDR.

If you want to add an M.2 drive to an older computer, consider one of the many PCIe cards. I've not used any of them, but suggest you stick with the x4, x8 or x16 channel versions and avoid the x1 (single channel) cards.

61Yg4zIO-OL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

sonnet_m2_8x4_slilent_gen4_pcie_card_no_heatsink_w_ssds.jpg


I had mentioned in original message ,,the thought was to 'convert' a bonded sata port/controller into M.2 nvme (ssd),, to leverage the nvme throughput possibilities.
It's not going to happen. Why would anyone waste tens/hundreds of hours trying to reverse engineer an old BIOS and motherboard hardware, when they can just go out and buy a modern motherboard? Technology changes all the time. Who knows what we'll be using as storage in 20 years time? I doubt it will be M.2 NVMe.
 
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They do make 2.5" M.2 sata drive caddies to sata port adapters

Amazon

But just because some people dont use sata ports anymore does not make them useless, I still run 3 x 18TB and 1 6TB drives in my computer along with 2 PCIe nvme drives. But until the time comes where you can get 60TB on solid state for $1000 ill keep my spinning rust platters going.
 

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