I'm curious about cabling options as it pertains to this particular model. There are two "official cables" listed... but, I'm wondering about non-standard/unofficial cables. In my particular case, I'm looking at wanting to pair the cage with a tri-mode HBA that... according to the specs... can support controlling 24 NVMe drives via single PCIe lane connections. The HBA has 3 x SlimSAS 8i connectors... so, for connecting to the Icy Dock enclosure, I would need a total of three breakout cables that go from 1 x SlimSAS 8i to 8 x OCuLink 4 (each wired for a single PCIe lane). I've never seen such a cable before. And, even if one existed, I'm not sure if the Icy Dock cage would be happy connecting with it (I'm really not sure how much if any interaction the cage has with the connected HBA or internal drives... or, if it's more or less a passive/passthrough connection). As it currently stands, I've only found what is essentially 1-to-2 breakout cables... 1x 8-lanes in, and 2x 4-lanes out. There are 1-to-8 cables that have SATA/SAS connectors on the storage device end... but, none that I've found that are 1-to-8 with single lane OCuLink connections.
I know connecting a single PCIe Gen 4 lane to a storage device seems a bit odd since many NVMe drives will easily be capable of saturating that one lane. But, it's still much faster than a SATA 3 lane (16Gbps vs 6Gbps). And, when considering a single HBA can potentially be connect to 24 of said drives... that will in all likeliness put the HBA's PCIe x16 host slot as the bottleneck. For my use case... that's 100% acceptable.
All that said... the two questions stand as:
1) Does such a cable exist that anyone has used before?
2) Will the Icy Dock enclosure be happy working with a single-lane OCuLink cable like that?
Thanks in advance for any input on this matter.
EDIT: As a quick addendum to the above... and before anyone brings into question the sanity/viability of such a cable even being possible... In the documentation for the HBA, there is a cable similar-ish to the above desired cable... Broadcom MPN: 05-60006-00... which is a SlimSAS 8i connector on one end and 8x U.3 SFF-8639 connectors on the other end. So, however they are splitting/sharing ground and clock signals and the like I don't know... but, they have an official cable to support a 1-to-8 breakout. But, as an important note, that cable is meant to be direct connected to a drive. The drive end of the cable even has a spliced in SATA power connection. And, while I would be happy to go down that path, I don't see any Icy Dock cages that accept a full-on U.3 connection like that with cold-swap (easy external access) capabilities (please point me to said mystery product if I've happened to overlook it!
). The only way I see it going forward with using that particular cable would be to get an internal open-air 5.25 inch to 4x 2.5-inch cage converter like the Icy Dock FLEX-FIT MB344SP and then filling it with m.2 drives inserted into the Icy Dock MB705M2P-B converters. That's a plausible path... but it's also inconvenient (open-heart server surgery to swap a drive), and it's bulky (half the density of the MB873MP-B V2). For all the mess though... it would be cheaper by more than -50%. So, there's at least one silver lining. 
In any case... I'm still curious about a breakout to 8x single lane OCuLink and if the dive cage will care about such connectivity.
I know connecting a single PCIe Gen 4 lane to a storage device seems a bit odd since many NVMe drives will easily be capable of saturating that one lane. But, it's still much faster than a SATA 3 lane (16Gbps vs 6Gbps). And, when considering a single HBA can potentially be connect to 24 of said drives... that will in all likeliness put the HBA's PCIe x16 host slot as the bottleneck. For my use case... that's 100% acceptable.
All that said... the two questions stand as:
1) Does such a cable exist that anyone has used before?
2) Will the Icy Dock enclosure be happy working with a single-lane OCuLink cable like that?
Thanks in advance for any input on this matter.
EDIT: As a quick addendum to the above... and before anyone brings into question the sanity/viability of such a cable even being possible... In the documentation for the HBA, there is a cable similar-ish to the above desired cable... Broadcom MPN: 05-60006-00... which is a SlimSAS 8i connector on one end and 8x U.3 SFF-8639 connectors on the other end. So, however they are splitting/sharing ground and clock signals and the like I don't know... but, they have an official cable to support a 1-to-8 breakout. But, as an important note, that cable is meant to be direct connected to a drive. The drive end of the cable even has a spliced in SATA power connection. And, while I would be happy to go down that path, I don't see any Icy Dock cages that accept a full-on U.3 connection like that with cold-swap (easy external access) capabilities (please point me to said mystery product if I've happened to overlook it!
). The only way I see it going forward with using that particular cable would be to get an internal open-air 5.25 inch to 4x 2.5-inch cage converter like the Icy Dock FLEX-FIT MB344SP and then filling it with m.2 drives inserted into the Icy Dock MB705M2P-B converters. That's a plausible path... but it's also inconvenient (open-heart server surgery to swap a drive), and it's bulky (half the density of the MB873MP-B V2). For all the mess though... it would be cheaper by more than -50%. So, there's at least one silver lining. In any case... I'm still curious about a breakout to 8x single lane OCuLink and if the dive cage will care about such connectivity.
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