Question What does the U.2 interface on ASUS Workstation motherboards support?

[YourLocalGP]

ASUS says in the manual that the MiniSAS-HD connector is for U.2 drives or "up to 4 SATA drives". The BIOS has four entries for U.2 devices (the only option being hotswap enable/disable) so I take that to mean that, bandwidth constraints notwithstanding, the port can have up to 4 devices connected.

I have tried a simple MiniSAS HD-to-4xSATA cable without any success. None of the drives are recognized. Power is coming from the power supply just fine. My guess is that the manual is wrong and in fact, only U.2 devices are supported, but I am waiting for ASUS support to confirm that.

Has anybody used this port on a Pro WS X570-ACE board, and if so would you mind sharing your config and any issues you discovered?

 

[Aeacus]

Found this:

In answer to your question, the U2 connector used is a SFF-8643 (Mini-SAS HD) with NVMe support.
This gives you the option of using several cables-
SFF-8643 to NVMe SSD (SFF-8639)
SFF-8643 to 4 SATA
SFF-8643 to 4 SAS (SFF-8482)
SFF-8643 to Backplane connector - RAID or HDD enclosure (SFF-8087)

Plugging any of those description into Ebay, Amazon, etc., will bring up a usable cable.

Source: https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...oo-few-sata-connectors.2568745/#post-39901416