StarTech.com PEX4SFF8639 U.2 to PCIe Adapter

I've been benching a lot of M.2 and U.2 NVMe SSDs for work lately. While you'll find M.2 slots (1 or 2, anyway) on many consumer-level desktop motherboards, I haven't found many workstation/server boards with U.2 interfaces, unless they're supposed to be in a 1U or 2U form-factor server chassis.So that's where this item comes in. It's decidedly no-frills, but that's not really much for this board to do. It's essentially just taking a PCIe x4 slot and giving you an SFF-8639, along with enough card to screw the actual SSD to. I took this board and put it into a variety of SuperMicro, Tyan, Asus, and HP servers/workstations. Generally, my findings were good. In all cases the drive was usable, and in most cases it could be made the boot drive. Check your OS compatibility. Also, you'll want to make sure your motherboard chipset supports it.So, a device like this basically a commodity. It either works, or it doesn't. There aren't really opportunities for differences in performance, from brand to brand. This item worked with several Intel U.2 NVMe SSDs, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't do the same with any other SSDs. In a top-position horizontal riser, there's no interference with the lid of the server cases... and that's about the only thing I think could possibly go wrong. RECOMMENDED.

I installed it on my server, and everything works well. I hope they offer U.3 variants for PCIe 4.0.

Adapter card works as it is supposed to. I am using an intel 4TB u.2 nvme ssd with this adapter in my media server. Works great, but under sustained loads, it gets very warm/hot. Adding an additional fan to this area helped keep it under manageable levels.

Bought this about a year ago. Installed a Intel Optane 905p, 960GB 2.5" SSD. It has successfully run very heavy workloads 24/7, with sustained data rates for 1.0GB/sec since. No hesitation to recommend this product.

I've been running one of these since 2019 and just ordered a second one now. Both are working well. The new revision does have a jumper on it for compatibility?! I'm not sure what that is exactly about but ignoring that change both work well and have identical performance.I would recommend spending the little extra for this over the cheaper ones if you care about reliability.

Worked great out of the box with my optane drive and windows 11. My only issue is that it did not have thread locker on the 4 screws. Great product. 👍

Mated this to a Micron 9100 SSD. It works just fine with my Desktop PC. Simply plug and play. However, when I tried installing on my server PC. Dell T420, I didn't have any luck. the PC threw a hardware error. I then tried an alternative solution with a different card that makes use of a cable to connect to the drive with the added benefit of dedicated power. However, that approach also failed to work, the server threw the same error. Looks like some machines will run into a hardware compatibility issue with the drive itself as opposed to the adapter. Would be nice to know how to trouble shoot or address this type of issue.

Running macOS Catalina version 10.15.6 via on a Micron 9300 MAX 6.4TB U.2 SSD;On my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, via:Highpoint RocketStor 6661A Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe 3.0 X16 Expansion Chassis;StarTech.com U.2 to PCIe Adapter - x4 PCIe - For 2.5" U.2 NVMe SSD - SFF-8639 PCIe Adapter - U.2 SSD - PCIe SSD - U.2 drive (PEX4SFF8639).Had to disable System Integrity Protection via Terminal (csrutil disable)Installed Catalina from booting in Command-R (internet download)On this iMac via a TB3 connection, the drive runs at about 2400 read/write per BlackMagic Disk Speed TestRuns hot with constant use but the speed on the Micron 9300 MAX 6.4TB U.2 SSD remains stable.