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

High-Performance Computing Workstations & Servers
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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.

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you can use sas expanders with sas/sata HBAs

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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.

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In the same boat did you ever get this working?

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Was expanders are a thing too

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

backblaze
backblaze2268×4032 3.58 MB

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