Help Connecting Motherboard to Backplane

ionistarda

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Aug 13, 2021
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3
Hi All, I'm new to the world of hardware and hoping for some guidance on an issue I'm having connecting my motherboard to the backplane. I've tried a couple different configurations but can't get the HDDs to show up in the BIOS. Components:
My first attempt was to just connect everything together since the motherboard has 2 SAS ports and 4 SATA ports, and the backplane has 4 SAS ports. So I hadd all of the ports connected on the motherboard and 3/4 of the ones on the backplane. Based on my reading this will not work though because even though the SAS<->SAS connection uses the same ports, the motherboard does not have an SAS controller, only SATA over SAS.

Then I tried only plugging in the reverse breakout cable but still nothing. Should that have at least gotten 4 of the drives to show up? (semi-related question that has been bothering me - how does the backplane know which 4 drives map to the 4 SATA connections through the breakout cable?)

My last attempt was to muck around in the BIOS settings and enable the "spin up" setting for I-SATA[0-3]. Unclear what that setting does and I can hear the drives spinning even with it disabled but with it turned on. I still don't see the drives in the BIOS but when I boot TrueNAS, it stuck with a repeating message (noperiph:achich11:0-1:ffffffff): rescan already queued. Based on some other threads I've found, this message means there is a hardware problem. Would this imply that there is something wrong with the cable/backplane/drives/something else? Or is it just that I should keep that setting disabled?

Do I just need an HBA to make this work? Or is there some other cabling config that would work? Am I just a noob for assuming that 12 ports on the motherboard + 12 bays in the chassis would be simple to connect?
 

danb35

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Aug 16, 2011
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Do I just need an HBA to make this work?
Yes. Your motherboard has SAS ports, but not a true SAS controller behind them--it's only SATA. If you were using a -A backplane, that wouldn't be a problem, because those backplanes do the same thing--but the backplane you're using has a built-in SAS expander, and that means it needs a proper SAS controller to talk to it.
 

ionistarda

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Joined
Aug 13, 2021
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3
Got the HBA today and realized it is x8 but the motherboard only has an x4 PCI slot. The HBA fits and I can see the 4 drives I've gotten already but will this cause problems down the line? I don't need super high bandwidth, just a large amount of storage.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Nov 25, 2013
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This setup will just deliver less PCIe bandwidth than the HBA theoretically could. It will not pose a fundamental problem. You could look up the specs (Wikipedia) and check if they still outmatch your disk drives or not.
 
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