SOLVED Incompatible SATA connectors?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi all,

this is not TrueNAS specific but there are so many regulars here who have a lot of knowledge and experience with storage hardware. And even if I don't get much advice someone might profit from this, so ...

We run a couple of Fujitsu RX1330M2 machines. These are rather dated, but they have great power efficiency and reliability.

FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX1330 M2 - Fujitsu United States

If you click on the third picture in the slider - that's the configuration. 4x 3.5" SATA. So far so good. A disk drive failing we replaced the drive with a new one of the same model (it seemed). The new drive would not be recognized by the machine. At all.
When plugging in there is a short flash of the HDD indicator light, but that's it. Not probed in FreeBSD, not recognized in the BIOS setup, nothing.

What I found today is that the old drives in this machine are ST8000NM000A while the new drive is of model ST8000NM001A. I took a picture of the connectors.


The ST8000NM000A does work while the ST8000NM001A doesn't. Does anyone have an explanation for this subtle change? Looks like the plug on the backplane doesn't give way for the second connector and because there is no gap pushes it up just so slightly. The HDD can be inserted without excessive force just fine. But the contacts are obviously not touching their counterparts.

Is there any standard term for this "feature"? How can I make sure other drives, possibly from other manufacturers, I buy in the future have the connector on the left?

Kind regards,
Patrick

 

[awasb]

*1A ist SAS, not SATA AFAIK(AS).

Exos 7E8 Enterprise Hard Drive | Seagate US

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[Patrick M. Hausen]

Ah ... I did not place the order, just pulled the drives from the spare parts drawer. Thanks!

 

[jgreco]

*1A ist SAS, not SATA AFAIK(AS).

Exos 7E8 Enterprise Hard Drive | Seagate US

The Seagate Exos 7E8 enterprise hard drive confidently stores up to 8 TB of data without sacrificing performance.

www.seagate.com

The diagnosis here is correct. I thought Seagate added a different letter to the end of the part number for SAS drives though. I am busy cooking and don't have the time to look right now. But the "bridge" between the "SATA" and "power" is classically what you would get for SAS, and if you look on the top of it (the hard-to-see side) you should see the SAS secondary pins.

 

[rvassar]

Additionally, just in case anyone finds this in a search... That "notch" that gets filled in between the data & power plug locking SAS drives out of SATA only configurations will contain additional pins for PCIe 3.0 differential pairs and a refclk in a U.2 NVMe device.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

That "notch" that gets filled in between the data & power plug locking SAS drives out of SATA only configurations

Thanks again. So the backplane of my servers seems to be SAS and SATA - the drives went in without force, but the controller is SATA only.

 

[jgreco]

the controller is SATA only.

Yeah, you can get that sort of weirdness. Some of the Intel PCH SCU's are SATA-only but brought out on an SFF-8087, and a more recent super-annoying space saving hack on boards like the X10SDV-7TP4F is to bring out SATA on SFF-8643's, conventionally used for SAS 12Gbps. Oh wait that one is actually SAS 6Gbps too. Can't rely on connectors to identify stuff. It's like they're deliberately TRYING to make it hard for newcomers.