Sata Multiplier on top of LSI HBA Card, Is this possible?

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for being patient with an enterprise noob like me. I’m not super new to server hardware\RAID in general, but i am pretty much outside my comfort zone if we’re no longer dealing with Windows or pretty Supermicro boxes.

Anyway, to the point. I recently acquired a Backblaze Storage Pod and want to turn it into an UnRAID server to host my media. I know people have complained about the Sata Multipliers in here being tricky so i went into this project with a bit of caution. To my surprise when plugged directly into my motherboard SATA ports, all 5 drives on one backplane light up! Working fine with no drivers, or weird configurations. UnRAID even picks them up perfectly.

I have an LSI 9305-16i which is just a SAS3 HBA, and when i connect it to the SiI3726 SATA Port Multipliers only one drive shows up in the card BIOS as recognized. I want to use this 4 Port HBA card because it would free up all my other SATA ports and PCI-E slots for other uses. I could connect all 9 backplanes to it and the card wouldn’t even break sweat, in theory.

Is this even possible or is splitting the Mini sas --> 4 Sata --> 5 split backplane just too much?

Thanks for the help in advance.

you can use sas expanders with sas/sata HBAs

You may need to initialise the other drives in the bios for them to show up. It may be a card setting that expects a previous array to still be there o. The other ports if second hand. See if there is a reset option. Otherwise this should work for your use case.

In the same boat did you ever get this working?

Was expanders are a thing too

@nx2l Not sure what “expanders” are, the unit has a these not sure if that is what you’re asking?

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