How to install Intel Optane U.2 SFF 8639 SSD drive in a PCIe slot
Greg Schulz
Independent IT Analyst, Author, Blogger, Consultant, 9 time Microsoft MVP, Previous 10 time vExpert, at StorageIO, Founder PicturesOverStillwater.com creative services, FAA Part 107 drone operator & FAASTeam DronePro
Need to install or use an Intel Optane NVMe 900P or other Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) Express NVMe based U.2 SFF 8639 disk drive form factor Solid State Device (SSD) into PCIe a slot?
For example, I needed to connect an Intel Optane NVMe 900P U.2 SFF 8639 drive form factor SSD into one of my servers using an available PCIe slot.
The solution I used was an carrier adapter card such as those from Ableconn (PEXU2-132 NVMe 2.5-inch U.2 [SFF-8639] via Amazon.com among other global venues.
The many facets of NVMe as a front-end, back-end, direct attach and fabric
Context is important with NVMe in that fabric can mean NVMe over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe) where the NVMe command set protocol is used in place of SCSI Fibre Channel Protocol (e.g. SCSI_FCP) aka FCP or what many simply know and refer to as Fibre Channel. NVMe over Fabric can also mean NVMe command set implemented over an RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) based network.
Another point of context is not to confuse Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) which are the storage or memory media and NVMe which is the interface for accessing storage (e.g. similar to SAS, SATA and others). As a refresher, NVM or the media are the various persistent memories (PM) including NVRAM, NAND Flash, 3D XPoint along with other storage class memories (SCM) used in SSD (in various packaging).
Learn more about NVMe at www.thenvmeplace.com including how to use Intel Optane NVMe 900P U.2 SFF 8639 disk drive form factor SSDs in PCIe slots as well as for fabric among other scenarios.