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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Anybody try one? Asking for . . . a friend.
With USB to PCIe bridges existing, there is no reason you can’t make a USB connected version of pretty much anything PCIe.
I wouldn’t trust these in a production system, but that’s likely not what they are intended for. Use cases for these are probably for data recovery, disk wiping, imaging before going into a production system, troubleshooting etc. etc.
It’s something you keep in your box-o-tools that might come in handy some day in a pinch while troubleshooting a server or workstation. It is NOT something you would use to connect a bunch of SAS drives via USB and run a storage pool off of. That would probably be a really bad idea.
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