Hi, I’m in the process of building a homeserver for media and backup purposes and am having trouble with my backplane.
The specs:
Asus Pro WS W680 ACE
Intel I5-12500
2x32GB DDR5 ECC @4800MHz (KSM48E40BD8KM-32HM)
2x500GB WD Red SN700 for OS (Ubuntu server 24) running in software raid1
Inter-tech NAS-8 case
(Planned) 4x14TB SATA HDDs for 2 ZFS mirror VDEVs
(Planned) 2x1TB SATA SSDs for 1 ZFS special device mirror VDEV
The problem:
I currently only have the NVME drives with the OS installed in the device. The case comes with 2 MiniSAS (SFF-8643) backplanes, having 4 slots each. My plan was to connect 1 backplane via my motherboards SlimSAS (SFF-8654) connector for the HDDs, and attach the SSDs directly via SATA, with potentially installing an HBA in the future as an upgrade path if I decide I need more drives.
However, the moment I connect a backplane with my DeLOCK (85081) cable, no drives are being recognized anymore and the PC just boots to BIOS. Inserting a (non-empty) HDD I had laying around into a bay of the connected backplane doesn’t change anything (the cage lights up though). I have trouble finding any resources regarding the case/backplanes, as it doesn’t seem to be a popular option for some reason. Does someone know what the issue might be, or give me some pointers for troubleshooting?
Aah I see, thanks, guess I‘m stuck getting an HBA from the start after all. Is there any way to verify that this is indeed the issue before buying one? Since I might get it from eBay and won’t be able to return it
Yes, reverting the setting from SATA to PCIE also doesn’t do anything. Still, your question made me discover that the SlimSAS connections weren’t marked as hot-pluggable, but changing that sadly also didn’t help.
Is there a way to check whether the backplanes support SAS or SATA only? Because I also expected them to be SATA, based on their case (aimed at consumers) and its price
I can’t think of a good way of testing it other than plugging it into known good controller+cable.
My suspicion falls on the cable now; sometimes cable manufactures do weird things with the sideband pins on their cables and I don’t see a wiring diagram on delock’s site for the 85081 to make sure they didn’t route one of the SB pins to somewhere it shouldn’t be.
After checking the case vendors website again I found that the backplanes are rated for 12Gb/s, so I’m pretty sure they’re SAS at this point, thanks for the help
Yeah the connector looks to be SAS compatible too (lack of bridge between power and data portions of the connector), but the connector on the backplane will have the exact same pinout as SATA.
The only thing that should be able to break SATA compatibility is if there was an expander chipset on the backplane.
@Daniel_McGee You might not be the only one having the W680 ACE slimsas sata problem.
Two people describing the same problem makes it seem more like a BIOS regression, or possible some new setting in the BIOS that was added that prevents sata connections until it is tweaked.
I actually didn’t when I created this thread (I’m in the process of doing it right now). Also, I already returned the DeLOCK cable and ordered an HBA, so I sadly can’t do any further testing with the SlimSAS connector.
Do you have any m.2 drives installed in your PC? Because mine were both undetected when the backplane was connected, which makes me wonder why your SATA devices still work (maybe it’s related to NVME somehow?)
so i have 2 M.2 drives connected directly into the Mobo, but they’re still recognized. I have 4 mechanical drives that were connected to the Mobo via SlimSAS to SATAx4.