motherboard: AsRock Rack X470D4U
case: AUDHEID K7 8 Bay NAS Case
With many SATA HDDs running truenas
I was recently gifted a rack and some empty cases including a supermicro CSE-826A-R920LPB chassis with PSUs, drive trays and back-plane and SFF 8087 cables but nothing else.
How would you go about transplanting things? The back plane says “SAS/SATA drive bay with SES2 and Mini-i-Pass (SFF 8087) connectivity” but I am at a loss for how to actually get this hooked up to my existing motherboard. Can i just swap the cables in the server track for regular sata and hook them up that way? or is the back-plane doing more than that? I am having a really hard time finding a short PCIE card that can take 3xSFF 8087 totaling 12 SAS/SATA connectivity.
I have not done much with dedicated rack server hardware and feel out of my depth when it comes to SFF because of just how many different standards(SAS/SATA/PCIE/NVME?) seem to be able to use this connector.
Here’s a suitable card for the SFF8087 connections:
You may need to shop around for better deals, but at least you know these cards exist. (there are others, read the descriptions carefully and look up the manuals from the original manufacturer to understand what you’re getting)
I happen to have the same board and the PCIe slots are Gen3 (about 3500 MB/s) but for SATA drives that’s way overkill. Most HDD’s won’t be able to move more then 200-250MB/s so only if you have all 12 bays full would a PCIe gen3 card make sense. It’s a different story if you employ SSD’s though, those can utilise the max speed of a SATA3 connection at 500-550MB/s.
The backplane is indeed a little more involved, as it allows hotplugging drives by having a fixed combined connector for both power and data to the drives. As the images show, there’s some logic and power stabilisation involved too. So, while you could do w/o the backplane technically, I’d recommend against it.
Nice! No all HDDs and total throughput isn’t a huge worry.
I should have specified, I did not want to get rid of the backplane itself. I was wondering if i could just run sata from the backplane to a SATA card instead of finding a SAS card.
Unfortunately the server only takes half height (3") PCIE cards, that looks like a fullsize card? should I just get a riser card then?
There are low profile cards too, just hunt around on Aliexpress or ebay. Alternatively, use 2 cards with 8 ports each, those are most certainly available low profile. Be aware that there are external cards as well, those are meant for disk-shelfs and have their ports on the rear of the chassis. It’s in the name: a -16i is an internal card while an -16e is the external variant. LSI is now owned by Broadcom. Keyword in your searches is HBA or host-bus-adapter. Make sure the card you buy is flashed in IT mode.
As long as that card is in IT mode it should be fine. However, it’s not mentioned specifically here, so assume it’s a RAID card. Which is NOT what you want!
As an alternative, use only 8 bays of storage so you can have that PCIe slot back.
With newer SAS cards yes, there’s usually an option, but newer SAS cards usually don’t use SFF8087 connectors anymore either, so you need to be careful.
With older cards, you have to hunt for the right IT mode firmware for your exact card model (or buy frome someone who already did). It is usually available for LSI models, but I would make sure before you purchase.
My original thread was not about adding SATA/SAS drives, rather adding multiple PCIe devices (preferably half height cards) to single PCIe slots on motherboards that support PCIe bifurcation.
It is really funny because this is exactly what I am going through. I have a DL380e with 12 3.5" drive bays. I got the model without the built in SAS expander so I have 3 mini-sas connections.
I was just looking at some pcie x16 boards that give you 2 sff-8654 (slimsas 8i) connections. Then get breakout cables to mini-sas. I just really hate the idea of not having plugs on the back of my case so I can pull it out of the rack quickly. You can get full height cards with 4 sff-8088 or half heights with sff-8644(I think). The later run very hot from my reading.
I had planned to move my home server (AsRock Rack x570d4u-2l2t with an R5 3600) from its 4u plinkcase to my Thermaltake Core G3. But that leaves me in case that doesn’t support vertical card configs (maybe half height) but no vertical rear slots. If I use the horizontal slots and riser for the x16, it covers the x1 and x8.
