Recently I started eyeballing these seagate enterprise drives on ebay. They are 8TB 4kn SAS3 drives for roughly $110. I’m sure I’m taking a gamble on them but if they end up being alright I would like to begin adding them to my array.
I have a Rosewill RSV-L4412 which uses these hot swap bays and appears to support SAS drives. Users in the reviews area report success with SAS in these bays, however something that confuses me… they are sata on the back of the cage
and yet on the internal backplane
Looking more into this, they dont seem to be the only ones doing such a thing.
Supermicro has this backplane which appears to use SATA on one side and supports SAS
How is this possible and when did it start?
Ultimately I’d like to use my current rosewill case with a 9300-8i and sata breakout cables to my SAS capable backplane. I’m not sure its going to work, but I’m otherwise at a loss how other people appear to be using these cages in this way.
Could the backplane have a built in reverse-er? Like reverse breakout SFF8087->SATA cables? Saying that, how do reverse breakout cables themselves work? Must be more than just dropping some pins or something?
My understanding was the pins between what would otherwise be normal sata connectors had some data function, but I’m new to this so I had assumed this meant there was more to the standard than just the conductors involved with typical sata.
This seems illegal and I’m waiting for the authorities to come and shoot my dog server.
Also what @Trooper_ish said about forward and reverse breakout is now baking my noodle fully into a nice lasagna.
I don’t know how it works, but I have a backplane with a SFF8087 connector, and I use a reverse breakout cable to connect the backplane to four SATA sockets on my motherboard.
Both SAS and SATA drives seem to work in it.
I have no idea how backplanes work, but might have something to do with channels or something?
There must be some smarts on them, even if they don’t have multipliers or whatever