SFF-8639 Connection (NVME) renamed to U.2 Cable
If you haven’t heard of the SFF-8639 or U.2 cable don’t be alarmed they’re rather new connections used for the new line of NVME hard drives. The 2.5″ NVME SSD are so new, and the cables are so new that you can’t find them from retailers, and the only way until very recently to acquire the cable was by ordering an Intel 750 NVME SSD.
Also, keep in mind very few if any motherboards currently support cable direct-attached NVME drives and many are testing the PCIE versions of these SSD.
The good news…
There are a number of us testing the SuperMicro AOC NVME PCIE adapter cards (2 models) so there will soon be much more information in regards to what motherboards support the NVME card + 2.5″ NVME SSD. SuperMicro doesn’t have the cables to provide for these drives to direct attach either. The AOC PCIE NVME card is made to be used with SuperMicro’s NVME backplane in their chassis and thus they don’t have a U.2 cable.
In the coming week I will be sharing my results from the SuperMicro AOC NVME cards with various SuperMicro motherboards from the latest XEON 2011-v3/r3 generation to the older but still very viable Intel Xeon 2011 r1 and r2 motherboards.
