I'm looking at a Norco 4220 box to rehouse my several home servers into one box, and I'm basically looking for a fact-check of what I've found so far. To note, I do have two 2.5" SAS drives to use as mirrored boot, but the 20x3.5" bays will be using SATA drives only.
The SAS backplane of the Norco box takes SFF-8087 cables, as you would expect. I have an Adaptec 3805 card, so can feed only two out of the five banks (two internal connectors, zero external) so will need an expander to fully utilise all bays. The Adaptec range seems to have problems with the HP expander (P410) but the Intel seems to play nice (RES2SV240), so:
- Am I right in that I will need one SFF8087->8087 cable to feed the Intel expander from the Adaptec card, leaving five ports, each needing a 'straight' 8087-8087 cable to feed the backplane?
- The remaining 8087 port on the Adaptec will need an 8087->4x8482 cable in order to use the two SAS boot drives and single SATA optical drive mounted in the case separate to the bays. This cable will take power injected from the PSU to the drives.
- The Intel card comes with a molex power socket. From the Intel docs, it would seem that if I am using a spare PCIe slot rather than mounting it to a chassis wall, I do not need to use this as it will draw power from the board. Anyone know if that is correct?
- Also, I have seen reverse breakout cables to connect 4xSATA ports to 1x8087 port. I assume that if I used one I could use whatever bank on the backplane it is plugged into, but could only use SATA drives, not SAS, although I am unclear why. This last question is very unlikely to come up in reality, and is more for interest
- Lastly, and probably most importantly, will using stock consumer SATA drives in an Adaptec RAID be an issue as they don't support ERC/TLER/CCTL? I ask because the Adaptec card is left over from an older, failed project where I tried to use multiple 1TB laptop drives in a Supermicro SAS backplane. Drives kept dropping out of the array and the only explanation I could find was this timeout issue. I'm hoping desktop drives are a bit quicker and won't fall foul of it.
Sorry if the questions seem basic. I'm pretty sure I've got this lot right, but just want to check absolutely before I go ahead with buying bits
The SAS backplane of the Norco box takes SFF-8087 cables, as you would expect. I have an Adaptec 3805 card, so can feed only two out of the five banks (two internal connectors, zero external) so will need an expander to fully utilise all bays. The Adaptec range seems to have problems with the HP expander (P410) but the Intel seems to play nice (RES2SV240), so:
- Am I right in that I will need one SFF8087->8087 cable to feed the Intel expander from the Adaptec card, leaving five ports, each needing a 'straight' 8087-8087 cable to feed the backplane?
- The remaining 8087 port on the Adaptec will need an 8087->4x8482 cable in order to use the two SAS boot drives and single SATA optical drive mounted in the case separate to the bays. This cable will take power injected from the PSU to the drives.
- The Intel card comes with a molex power socket. From the Intel docs, it would seem that if I am using a spare PCIe slot rather than mounting it to a chassis wall, I do not need to use this as it will draw power from the board. Anyone know if that is correct?
- Also, I have seen reverse breakout cables to connect 4xSATA ports to 1x8087 port. I assume that if I used one I could use whatever bank on the backplane it is plugged into, but could only use SATA drives, not SAS, although I am unclear why. This last question is very unlikely to come up in reality, and is more for interest
- Lastly, and probably most importantly, will using stock consumer SATA drives in an Adaptec RAID be an issue as they don't support ERC/TLER/CCTL? I ask because the Adaptec card is left over from an older, failed project where I tried to use multiple 1TB laptop drives in a Supermicro SAS backplane. Drives kept dropping out of the array and the only explanation I could find was this timeout issue. I'm hoping desktop drives are a bit quicker and won't fall foul of it.
Sorry if the questions seem basic. I'm pretty sure I've got this lot right, but just want to check absolutely before I go ahead with buying bits