SOLVED Backplane choice for Supermicro 836 family chassis

[ceefaineiquohnaengan]

I have an old SC836 family chassis that I'm looking to revive for a storage array. It previously had a 3Ware 9XXX card in it which will be going to the summerlands. In looking over it I saw that it has a BPN-SAS-836TQ Revision 2.0 board. Doing some digging, I haven't found any strong indications of the difference between the 1.0, 2.0, and 3.2 revisions of the board.

I'm questioning replacing the backplane to ensure that I can handle SATA III without any issues. I'm going to be running a mix of Samsung SSDs and spinning rust to present volumes of a few different classes out of the host. For the purpose of this, let's figure 8 spinning disks and 8 SSDs. The chassis has plenty of PCI slots, so compensating with the correct number of LSI HBAs as to optimize the throughput shouldn't be an issue.

Does anyone have recommendations for:
Backplane to pick which will be able to handle the SSDs
Number of PCIe2 x8 HBAs to optimize the throughput? (I'm going to be replacing the motherboard as well, so PCIe3 isn't outside the realm of possibility, but it's not that high on my list of requirements).

Thanks.

 

[Chris Moore]

The TQ backplane is just a pass through, like a wire, it has next to no affect on the signaling. No need to change it unless you want to use a backplane with integrated SAS expander.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[ceefaineiquohnaengan]

Perfect! Less is more. Thanks for the info.

 

[Chris Moore]

Perfect! Less is more. Thanks for the info.

You might want to consider using a SAS Expander like this to allow you to run all the drives from a single SAS controller:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-46m0997-ServeRAID-Expansion-Adapter-16-port-SAS-Expander/192326557905
I use several SAS controllers like this in different systems and they are quite reliable:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-H220-6G...9205-8i-P20-IT-Mode-From-US-Ship/192639052923

 

[Ericloewe]

That said, a backplane with integrated expander would result in much neater wiring than a TQ + expander.