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12 bay Aliexpress drive cage. How to connect?
Hello smart people!
I have a technical question about a product on Aliexpress I can't seem to find the answer. Be gentle with me please :-)
My setup is based on Supermicro H11SSL-i, where currently I also have a LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA LSI 9200-8i card
Currently I have my setup in an frankenstein monster based on Silverstone DS380 and CS380 cases.
And now the item in question: 12 bay 3.5-inch hard drive cage
The cage, depending on what you pick has either two SFF-8643 or two SFF-8087 interfaces. According to the description. I should be able to chain these boxes to each other as well.
I dont know SFF-8643, but I met SFF-8087 interface several times with those cables where you get 4 SATA connectors. A lot of HBA cards I went through also states that one SFF-8643 port has 4 internal connectors for drives.
At this point I am really confused, because even if I used both SFF-8643 on one cage, it is still 6 drives per port which seems unsupported, let alone chaining.
Could anybody shade some light about how this is supposed to work? Maybe recommend what HBA card would I need were I to buy this cage? (or two). Thank you very much
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I'm not sure if it's stated in the listing somewhere because the translations are wonky for me, but it might work.
AFAIK no HBA supports 6 port breakout.... HOWEVER, if that backplane has a SAS expander chip hidden under that heatsink, then the HBA doesn't have to.
Basically IF the backplane has an expander chip, it can act like a USB hub. You only have 1 port on your computer but the hub can break that out to multiple ports.
If that's the case then daisychaining should work as well. Most of the expander chips I've seen do at least 64 drives with some hitting 1024 drives, which is stupid but possible.
Any of the regularly recommended HBAs should work (IF THE BACKPLANE HAS AN EXPANDER CHIP). If not then I have absolutely no idea how it's supposed to work.
Thank you! You have the same theory as one of my friends. The cage does not cost that much so I might just try it and see
how did it go? im highly interest in this setup as im also in need of something similar for a shallow rack
Hey, It went pretty smoothly. I have two of those cages. I did not put them into "production" yet, but I tested them and it works as expected. You need to have a SAS HBA card, you connect the cage to it and thats it.
I tried to add / remove drives and it works well. If you are interested in anything particular, just ask and I can try :-)
I did not get a rackmount for the cage, so you will have to hack that out. Right now, I am working on designing side enclosures for fans, because it does not have any cooling for the drives
in the picture and description you can use a single SAS port connected to support the 12 drives, you can connect another sas port if you want to double the bandwidth because you'd have 1 sas port using 6Gb/12Gb shared over 12 drives.
Looks like the backpane powers the drives using 4 molex connectors from your PSU.
doesn't say what the difference between the full rack, set a, set b though so no idea what that is
Thank you again!