I’ve been browsing aliexpress to buy some SAS adapters for an LTO drive and discovered this oddity of a SAS to USB adapter that per reviews seems to actually work? From quick research the other alternative is CXRT adapter that does the same thing but instead of costing $40 it costs $500
Anyone actually tried these? I’m tempted to get one to try it out but the only SAS devices that I have are LTO drives. Surely this doesn’t support the full SCSI set…
If anyone has one of these cursed devices please open it up and post the pcb pics I really want to know what cursed engineering has occurred here
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I found a listing on Amazon (multiple, actually) so it appears to be legit. Having said that, the Amazon seller I looked at explicitly states U.2 drives are not supported. It also states that the unit doesn’t have a power brick included and SMART reports are essentially false/wrong/incorrect. (encircle as appropriate 
)
Given that those online sellers usually reuse marketing stuff made available by the actual manufacturer it’s pretty safe to assume those claims are indeed correct.
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U.2 support is understandable as there’s no PCIe connection and it’s just USB
But the lack of proper SMART data and it giving garbage data suggests that they just made a minimum viable product and filled the rest of the SAS protocol with polyfills and might not work with a lot of drives
Don’t have budget to just get one with bunch of SAS drives and probe it but boy it is tempting
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