Icy Dock DataCage Classic MB453IPF-B connection for sas drives

[spchtr]

I'm looking at options for adding a few sas drives to a system, but am new to how exactly sas drives hook up.

I came across this cage, which appears to have 6 sata ports on the back of it and was wondering how exactly this would hook up to a motherboard to support 3 sas drives. What type of cable would I need, and what would be the typical HBA that something like this would hook up to?

http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=105

 

[jgreco]

There's a nice discussion of SAS over in the hardware forum. It has 6 SAS ports on it, presumably three for the primary SAS and three for the secondary SAS ports, since most SAS drives are dualported. Any SAS HBA should be able to hook up to it. You don't need the secondary SAS ports.

 

[Robert Smith]

If you have a SAS controller on the motherboard, then you probably have a SAS header of some kind, so you will need the cable that splits the header connection to individual cables; that dock has six, two per drive.

Other times, individual connectors are already on the motherboard, then you just match them one-to-one with individual cables.

With SAS, each drive can be connected to two controllers (channels) simultaneously, so that if one controller fails the other one keeps working. With just one single channel controller you will use one data cable per drive (yellow ports), and leave the black ports unconnected.

Do not connect SAS drives to a SATA controller, the other way around is ok.

 

[jgreco]

I was going to comment on your original response, but apparently you made ten edits to your response and now there's nothing for me to add.

 

[spchtr]

Ahh, ok, I think I get it.

Say the M1015 for instance, 2 sas8087, breakout cable, 2 sata to each sas drive.

So I could have 2 M1015's both of which would hook up to each of 4 sas drives, for failover and performance?

 

[jgreco]

You won't be getting any better performance. Performance is limited by the drive itself. As for failover, yes, theoretically you could have a controller failure or a cable failure but these things are incredibly exceedingly rare. It is more of an issue when you have a server that has an external disk shelf - if you're reliant on a single cable that is connecting 48 drives, it really stinks if someone bumps the cable. So in practice you wouldn't ever do this for a typical monolithic FreeNAS server.