SAS/SATA backplane - Am I an Idiot or Just Slightly Off the Mark?

[Snowy]

Just started my build, and I have a supermicro chassis cse-833T0-653B which comes with a SATA833 backpanel for hotswapping 8 possible drives and a supermicro x10srh-cln4 motherboard with LSI 3008 controller.

I bought 6 WD Red NAS drives which come highly recommended from my readings, and the brain has finally put together what I bought.

These are SATA drives. I've read over months "LSI to IT mode, LSI to IT mode," and knew the 3008 can flash to IT mode, and thats about all I thought of it. But the LSI 3008 is a SAS interface now that I'm physically looking at it. The stickies here say SATA drives can work with a SAS controller, so it seems the NAS drives will be okay if I connect them to this SAS controller once flashed to IT mode.

My question is, can I use the SAS splitters found here: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=sff8087+sata&rmvSB=true
and connect it to my SATA backplane and keep using what I bought? Or do I need to explore getting a SAS backplane for the chassis?

 

[mav@]

No, you should be fine with that. SAS backplanes radically differ from SATA only when they have SAS Expander chip to support more drives then SAS lanes they receive from HBA. If your HBA has enough internal lanes and you are not going to use SAS drives with multipathing, then using SATA backplane is fine. For SATA drives there is just no any questions.

What's about IT mode, my personal opinion is that it is not that critical. Much more important is not to buy full RAID controllers with cache, battery, etc., that physically incapable to be a plain HBA or inefficient/unreliable in that role, but that's not the case for 3008. Flashing to IT _may_ slightly improve performance and theoretically improve reliability due to smaller firmware size, but I would not create a problem if there is any problem to reflash it.

 

[Dice]

Hello,
Slightly off the mark regarding the SAS breakout cable.
You've linked the older style SFF8087 break out cable. I believe you want the SFF-8643. Reference the manual.
Reflashing LSI3008 is done on a regular basis on the forum, I've not encountered any reports suggesting it is any more difficult than other LSIs.