Question U.2 port on MB to sata help

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BD White

BD White

Jan 18, 2022
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I'm trying to connect 8 samsung sata drives to my Asus Pro WS C422-ACE motherboard but I only have 6 sata ports, but no problem I thought since the MB manual clearly states "The Mini-SAS HD connector allows you to connect a Mini-SAS HD cable to support configurations such as U.2 devices or four SATA devices" So I purchased this cable:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08C2LJBLW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1
Hooked up the Mini-SAS HD to the U.2 port on my MB and the sata connectors to the drives and sata power to the PSU but no drives were recognized. Even poking around in the bios came up with nothing. So after some confusing searching I found a post from 10 years ago from someone saying they tried multiple cables that wouldn't work before trying this one which worked. So I thought, okay maybe it's the cable, and I purchased the same one the user had mentioned that had worked for him. This cable:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JOXWD6W/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Went through the same motions of hooking everything up... aaaannnnd nothing. No drive is recognized. WTF.

Can someone explain to me what I'm doing wrong? I'm so confused by this because it seems like this should work. Why would the manual say you can connect 4 sata devices to the U.2 Mini-SAS HD port and then not recognize when I do?

(I know I could just get a sata pcie expansion card but I don't have the slots available. I'm using all 3 for a graphics card, 10g network adapter, and plan to use the final slot for a m.2 NVMe x4 raid card.)
 
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BD White

BD White

Jan 18, 2022
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USAFRet said:
What are these 8x SATA drives used for?
What is the whole system used for?
Click to expand...
It's a NAS system I'm building. Plan was to have 8-12 sata ssd drives in raid 5 for long term storage then have a PCIe raid card with x4 m.2 NVMe drives for working project files. I do a lot of 3D rendering work.
 
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BD White

BD White

Jan 18, 2022
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0
10
USAFRet said:
RAID 0 + NVMe (or any SSD) only counts when copy large amounts of data between 2 such arrays.
For your actual 'rendering', the CPU and RAM have far more impact.

For your 8-12 SATA drives, why not an 8 bay external enclosure?
Click to expand...
The raid arrays I want to create are for redundancy(the sata ssd long term storage) and just to consolidate a lot of drives to 1(the m.2 NVMe pcie raid card for files I'm working off of) so that my files are no longer spread out over multiple computers. I have 3 computers, 1 is my main working computer, 1 is my render node loaded with multiple gpus, and this 1 was going to be the NAS to store all my files on and have each computer work from those files. I use a KVM switch to go between all three and I have them all rackmounted. I also use all 3 for rendering. I do a lot of 3D animation rendering in 4K with huge scenes.

So any idea as to what I'm missing about this U.2 to sata hook up? The MB manual says you can connect 4 sata devices to it but I can't get it to recognize any sata drive. I've tried both U.2 ports to no avail. I even tried hooking it up to the U.2 port on my render node MB (Asus WS C422 SAGE) thinking that maybe the port was just broken on my MB but nope, that didn't work either. Could this just not be supported and just be a typo in the manual?
 
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