I think this backplane is interesting for a number of reasons. I am worried a little bit about some of the unknowns. E.g. I could not find Inspur documentation on this product. I could find that it was part of a rack mount chassis that Inspur sells/sold at some point. But no details, such as what type of expander (passive or active), power consumption, exact product dimensions, etc.
There have been reasonable assumptions voiced on this thread so far.
Did you already figure out how to connect it to the rest of your computer? I.e. do you have a chassis this will fit in? Or do you plan for it to sit outside of your desktop case?
I will assume the goal is a rackmount solution (since this is what the backplane was designed for).
Hmm. I am not sure if the backplane is the optimal solution to your goals.
The most power efficient way connecting a bunch of HDDs is via drive to mobo sata cables. Depending on your mobo this will allow 4-16 drives (yes there are crazy mobos that allow direct connecting that many SATA drives).
In case your mobo doesn’t have enough ports to connect all the SATA drives you want, but it has one or more m.2 slots there are inexpensive adapters that provide 5-6 SATA ports per m.2 slot. Some are very power efficient and support power management, meaning the OS can put adapter logic and HDDs into low power modes when idle. This contrasts to SAS HBAs that are designed to run in servers with constant load and often don’t support power management at all - the expander chip in your backplane adds to the tally. It should be said that while they may work great they’re all flimsy at best.
Alternatively, here is a thread about a PCIe to SATA adapter using the same chip from Asmedia by connecting to a PCIe slot instead of a m.2 slot.
So, the optimal solution for up to say 8 HDDs efficiently is getting a desktop case (there are cases that double as short-depth 4U rackmount chassis) that can store said HDDs and connecting these to carefully selected mobo that has 8+ sata ports.
For up to 12-16 HDDs you can get a 4U chassis (e.g. this one) that allows storing and powering all these HDDs, cabling them to your mobo (directly or to m.2/PCIe adapter). My example is a no-frills, no hot-swap, cheap-but-reliable chassis.
Beyond 16 HDDs there is such a power and cooling demand that it would probably pay off looking for used server gear that is designed for it, which typically depends on HBAs and SAS expanders.
The HBA will consume extra power, an expander, if necessary, more so. However, these components will give you enterprise class proven reliability and performance, scalability in number of HDDs using SAS expanders, hot swap capabilities (that you didn’t mention as a need/want, yet), optimized cable management (not to forget - there will be a cable mess trying to connect 8+ sata cables - data +power).
I decided to pay the price of extra power consumption for the benefits that server-class technology offers me, but this may not be what you want.
Update: I should add some numbers to better illustrate my points:
Here is a video describing the build of a 23W rackmount home server. This is what is possible from a no-compromise power efficiency point of view.
I used to run a 5x HDD home server based on a Intel i5-6500 plus multiple nvme drives idling around 50W.
I also have a server that is not always on, 24x SAS HDDs, 4x NVMe, x99 based mobo housed in used Supermicro 847 chassis with single HBA (9305-16i) and two expanders for up to 36 HDDs, idling around 400W that provides up to 14GBs max storage bandwidth (measured during scrub operation) up to 4GB/s HDD bandwidth (in optimal condition).