Hello everyone, any insight on this would be highly appreciated...
My current system components when all is working:
8 x 3TB WE Red
Intel Atom C2750 on a Supermicro motherboard (A1SAi-2750F)
32GB memory
IBM M1015 SAS controller
So my goal was to add an additional 4 drives to this system but I had recently (4 months ago) moved this system into a new case which I quite like so I thought I would get a SAS enclosure and convert one of the internal SFF-8087 connections on my M1015 to an external one. I ended up purchasing the following components:
Silverstone TS431S mini sas enclosure - http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=423&area=en
An SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 bracket adapter (very much like this http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EMTCEI6/?tag=ozlp-20 )
A 1m SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cable to connect that bracket to the IBM 1015 internal port
And lastly a SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 to connect the back of the NAS to the back of that enclosure... The issue is that regardless of how I have attempted to configure this setup both FreeNAS and the SAS controller configuration utility (during the boot process) do not see any of the drives I have tried putting in the enclosure.
Now I haven't bought the drives that I will use in the enclosure but I had two western digital RED drives laying around (SATA drives) and those are the ones I used in the enclosure.
My concern here is that it seems that SATA has a cable length of 1M while SAS is much higher. I was under the impression however that the connection is counted as point to point, so the distance from the IBM M1015 controller in the server all the way to the termination of the SFF-8088 on the SAS enclosure would be considered SAS and only the actual drive connection is SATA? Or is the entire link dropped to SATA due to the drives? Could this be causing my issue as I am using a total of 3M of cabling which is obviously over the maximum for SATA.
If my issue is the cable length does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work without having to buy SAS drives? Biggest issue I have come across is finding .5M SAS cables.. Any suggestion is appreciated!
My current system components when all is working:
8 x 3TB WE Red
Intel Atom C2750 on a Supermicro motherboard (A1SAi-2750F)
32GB memory
IBM M1015 SAS controller
So my goal was to add an additional 4 drives to this system but I had recently (4 months ago) moved this system into a new case which I quite like so I thought I would get a SAS enclosure and convert one of the internal SFF-8087 connections on my M1015 to an external one. I ended up purchasing the following components:
Silverstone TS431S mini sas enclosure - http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=423&area=en
An SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 bracket adapter (very much like this http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EMTCEI6/?tag=ozlp-20 )
A 1m SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cable to connect that bracket to the IBM 1015 internal port
And lastly a SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 to connect the back of the NAS to the back of that enclosure... The issue is that regardless of how I have attempted to configure this setup both FreeNAS and the SAS controller configuration utility (during the boot process) do not see any of the drives I have tried putting in the enclosure.
Now I haven't bought the drives that I will use in the enclosure but I had two western digital RED drives laying around (SATA drives) and those are the ones I used in the enclosure.
My concern here is that it seems that SATA has a cable length of 1M while SAS is much higher. I was under the impression however that the connection is counted as point to point, so the distance from the IBM M1015 controller in the server all the way to the termination of the SFF-8088 on the SAS enclosure would be considered SAS and only the actual drive connection is SATA? Or is the entire link dropped to SATA due to the drives? Could this be causing my issue as I am using a total of 3M of cabling which is obviously over the maximum for SATA.
If my issue is the cable length does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work without having to buy SAS drives? Biggest issue I have come across is finding .5M SAS cables.. Any suggestion is appreciated!