Raptor Computing Systems Community Forums (BETA)

Third Party Hardware => General Discussion => Topic started by: pocock on October 17, 2021, 03:18:50 am

Title: Broadcom P411W-32P HBA, PCIe 4.0 x16 for NVMe (U.2, U.3 and M.2) SSDs
Post by: pocock on October 17, 2021, 03:18:50 am

Official site (https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/nvme-switch-adapter#pcie-gen-4-switch-adapter)

Specifications in PDF (https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/P411W-32P-UG)

This is a controller for multiple SSDs.  It uses a switch, not bifurcation.  As noted elsewhere, bifurcation is not really supported on Talos II

The specifications and price look interesting for workstation builds where you want to combine 2, 3 or 4 SSDs for a simple RAID-1 mirror with the Linux md RAID, btrfs or ZFS.

The benefit of buying this type of card is that only one PCIe slot is consumed for multiple SSDs.  On the systems with only two slots (Talos II Lite and Blackbird) that is an important consideration.

Specifications in PDF (https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/P411W-32P-UG) give a lot of detail about support for backplanes, it is not clear if you can simply connect the ports directly to U.2 SSDs using the right cable.

The M.2 SSDs can be mounted in U.2/M.2 carriers (https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-U-2-Adapter-SFF-8639/dp/B073W65QX6).

Has anybody tried it?