I was in the market for a Mini PC to use as an SMB/home server, and someone suggested I should look at Framework 13" motherboard + cooler master case. I liked this idea because the motherboard has four USB4 ports, and that’s exactly what I need for my server, because it’s going to use a lot of storage.
Unfortunately, it looks like the solution would have to lose two ports: one for Ethernet and another one for power. This only leaves two USB4 ports which is not enough for my scenarios.
I know I could use a docking station or another sort of USB hub to make power and Ethernet use the same port. But I hate this idea because it adds more links and interconnects, and it becomes too messy and fragile in my opinion. After all, if I had to use a dock, I could probably use some old laptop to fulfil the same end goal. If I’m going to buy and build something new, it rather be elegant and have all the ports in one piece.
So, are there any options? Can I use some of the slots on the motherboard (such as the one used for WiFi) for power and/or Ethernet? Ideally, I’d like to keep all four USB4 ports unoccupied (i.e., available for storage peripherals). But I can accept sacrificing one of them, i.e. keeping at least three of them available.
I would appreciate any thoughs on this topic, since I’m new to the Framework ecosystem and only vaguely understand its capabilities and limitations. Thanks!
With a little bit of work, it’s possible to find an A+E keyed M.2 Ethernet card that can be installed in place of the wireless card.
I bought one off eBay which I apparently cannot link to (as old product pages routinely get purged,) but it was an I226 2.5GbE card in the appropriate form factor. I was hoping to get vPro working with it[1], but if I wasn’t I would have bought one of the Realtek cards off AliExpress.
Thanks, Dustin! That’s very interesting and promising.
At first glance, both ebay and aliexpress have a buch of i226-v m.2 cards. But none seems to have a single offering for i226-lm. I’m willing to give it a try, even though the probability of “it wouldn’t always come back up after a cold boot” kinda defeats the purpose of having a server. There are also some options with Realtek chips but I’d assume they’re even less reliable.
Now, if only we could find a soluiton for powering the device without consuming an USB4 port…
For networking @DHowett allready got you options, you can also get those in 10gbit if you are not afraid of paying out of the ass for it (and having an aquantia chipset), those i226 ones are probably the best bang for your buck rn.
For usb there are a bunch of internal usb ports on the board if you want to get a bit adventurous with wiring.
As for power you could probably do something cursed with the battery connector but I would not recommend it.
Thing is the fw boards with 4 usb4 ports still only got bandwidth for 2 so using 2 of the ports for stuff like usb or power doesn’t actually loose you any bandwidth so you could just daisy-chain from one port instead of using 2.
How are you planning on attaching your storage over usb4?
Ouch. Long story. I have two 8-Bay Thunderbolt 3 enclosures which I plan to move a bunch of data to. The data I’m going to move is currently sitting in two 8-Bay USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 (10 Gbps) enclosures and a whole bunch of other USB HDDs which are currently just piled on my desk.
So, I’ll have to connect all of that simultaneously at some point of time, and use as little hubs as possible because the current USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 storage solution has proven to be unreliable, and that’s the whole reason I want to move to Thunderbolt.
This is where my requirement to have at least three USB4 ports comes from: two for Thunderbolt enclosures, and at least one more for everything else. Which is already bad but might be manageable in the short term. Yes, those Thunderbolt arrays can be daisy chained in theory but I’m not sure how well it will work, I have not tried them yet.
(And yes, I can probably just reshuffle some HDDs between enclosures but not all of them. Because for some, it won’t even be a normal copy operation, it will be a recovery from a lost filesystem that spans several HDDs, so I cannot reuse the same drives for source and destination.)
Daisychaining has worked surprisingly well for me.
Well that is doable, one port goes down for power and maybe some usb and even gigabit networking (you can get little dingles with 100w pd pass-through and a bunch of usb ports for like sub 10$) or just use one port for just power and do networking with an m.2 card.
Yes, I was considering something like this for Power + Network. But I dislike dongles very much as I have enough of cable spaghetti already with my current solution. So I like the M.2 solution a lot better. Will most likely try it out.
Thanks, this makes sense. So, assuming I will go with Plugable (or other similar) adapter for combined power and Ethernet on one USB4 port, is there anything else useful or interesting I could squeeze out of the M.2 slot? I don’t need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, so I’m up to suggestions.
Aliexpress has some funky adapters that provide two USB 2.0 ports ouf of M.2 (e.g. this) but I consider it borderline useless as well.
There are other similarly questionable options to convert M.2 to Mini-PCIe, and then from Mini-PCIe to USB 3.0. This looks a bit more interesting to me. But unfortunately, it looks like that would need more power. The latter adapter has a SATA power socket for that, and it does not look like I could wire it to the Framework board, at least not with even more cursed cabling.
So, should I just give up and leave the M.2 slot empty? Or there are some other options that I overlook?
It’s a single lane of pcie plus some usb2 and some other stuff so the limit is basically your imagination and your tolerance for stacking adapters.
For a nas case the most logical thing that comes to mind is another ssd, asuming you can find some space for it.
You could also put the main ssd in there and use the x4 slot for something more interesting but we are quickly getting back into cable spaghetti 3000 territory.
There are also straight up m.2 to usb3 adabter and stuff, no need to invlove mini pcie.
If you don’t need anything I don’t really see anything wrong with leaving it empty. Good to have options, noone os forcing you to use all of them.
This sounds tempting. However, it’s surprisingly hard to find a definitive answer on what works and what does not. For instance, this thread says that the secondary M.2 slot is E keyed, and based on my understanding, this rules out all kind of storage devices (both mSATA and NVMe.) But I’m not an expert here.
I would be grateful for some examples. So far, I coudl only find A+E keyed cards that convert to either USB 2.0, PCIe x1 or Mini-PCIe. None of that seems ideal.
You can’t directly plug an (nvme)ssd in there but you can with an adabter (something like this or this if you need to position it somehwre else). You just got a single lane of pcie so of course it’s going to be slowe but I does work, you can probably even find a picture on here somewhere where I demonstrate it. NVME is just pcie and you got one lane of pcie, you just gotta wire the right pins to the right ting.
Could swear I had seen those but can’t find one rn.
