I’m looking to buy the backplane of an HP DL180 G6 and I noticed that it has a “3-pin backplane I2C connector” which connects to the motherboard. https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c01727924
I have 0 idea what this I2C connector is doing and what happens when it’s disconnected. I’m wondering if the owner of an HP DL180 G6 could simply unplug the I2C connector from their server and tell me whether they can still see the drives in the host O.S (or even BIOS?)? I’m thinking of buying only the backplane and connecting it via SAS to a completely different motherboard.
Point 2 seems to suggest that the DL180 didn’t see any disks on the backplane with the I2C cable disconnected. However that could be unique to the HP server.
Doing some more googling about I found someone suggesting that they got a troublesome H220 to boot with their HP blackplane by pulling out the i2c cable that goes between the backplane and the motherboard in their server.
I tried this, and I was able to get the server to boot!
Only problem is, now it doesn’t see any of the drives connected tot he backplane, so I guess that didn’t really solve anything.
Welp, that’s unfortunate. It looked like a pretty nice backplane with a built-in SAS expander. I doubt the SAS expander will show the discs without that I2C connection sadly. Trying to decode and have an arduino tell that I2C connection is more trouble than it’s worth.