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To summarize: It will be a bummer to ship all these parts then fly out to do the build to find out a $2,000 RAID card doesn't play nice with a backplane. or that i bought the wrong cable since the backplane says "SlimSAS x8" ports and the card says "x8 SFF-8654" ports. It would also be helpful if there was any constructive criticism incase I'm overlooking something.

I am putting together a new machine for a client of mine. I would like the extra speed of NVMe drives and I want to have the redundancy of RAID 6.

Initially there will be a 6 drive RAID 6 array which should use up all 3 ports on the Broadcom card. When this fills up we will get another card and another 6 drives. The backplane combines 2 NVMe drives into a single SlimSAS x8.

The question: Will this combo of parts work? I think it will but Broadcom support has gotten word from some customers that only 4 drives show up on these cards but I'm thinking Broadcoms customers are connecting the backplane to one of Broadcom's 2 port cards and expecting the Supermicro backplane to run as if it has an expander built in which it does not. So has anyone used one of these Broadcom cards with a Supermicro NVMe backplane with 5 or 6 NVMe drives? (as much as I can tell the 1U backplane that supports 10 NVMe drives should be wired similarly to this 12 drive backplane)

Any experiences with this setup or possible compatibility issues would be great. The fall back plan is using an expander backplane and a RAID card (probably the same one as above or the 2 port variant). But I would like the extra speed of the NVMe and I know shoving 6 NVMe drives through a RAID card will throttle them but it will still be much faster than a SATA bus. not to mention the theoretical maximum of 6 of those samsung drives is 40.2GBps and pcie 4.0 can handle 32GBps unidirectionally and those are theoretical maximums if all the data is perfectly laid out and assuming 0 delays from the raid 6 calculations. Writing from the array has a max theoretical throughput of just 24GBps which is below what the PCIe 4 bus can handle (64GBps bidirectionally). In short, I don’t think there is going to be much of a speed bottle neck here beyond what the raid card does.

I have looked into compatibility and am coming up with nothing Broadcom has told me they put in a ticket about compatibility with Supermicro and got back a response saying its not compatible but I know in the past I have talked with SuperMicro and they say that said that about things that simply have not been tested in their lab, and I suspect Broadcom not knowing the backplane doesn't have an expander may have worded their inquiry incorrectly.

and yes i have tried contacting supermicro but waiting for a reply.

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    Hi, welcome to Hardware Recs! Is your intention to use the RAID card for hardware RAID, or just as an HBA? What OS are you planning on running?
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Commented Jan 21 at 5:27

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I am the Product Manager at Graid Technology. While I'm uncertain about promoting my company's product here, I am confident that our SupremeRAID is a perfect match for your use case. Simply ensure all NVMe slots are directly connected to the CPU, install our GPU and driver, and you can easily set up a RAID6 with an initial six drives. Adding another six drives allows you to create a second RAID6 group without any hardware modifications. Our product is designed to reach the theoretical performance limits of RAID6 with 12 Gen4 NVMe drives using just one GPU card across any workload. If you're interested in exploring our solutions further, we are a partner with Supermicro as well (https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/graidtechnology).

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  • Hi Alven, self promotion is allowed, you can read the help on it. It becomes spam when you dont declare your association and/or the answer does not address teh question. This seems ok to me.
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Mar 2 at 4:10
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This is what I got back from SuperMicro:

Thank you for contacting Supermicro technical support, unfortunately we do not test and validate third part RAID controllers, for NVMe RAID this controller will not work is not compatible with our backplanes.

For NVMe RAID we only support VROC key module :

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/accessories/addon/AOC-VROCxxxMOD.php

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