Help understanding backplane on a SC933 Chassis

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mamruoc

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Hello, I was gifted a SC933 chassis (without motherboard). I have checked and found that it got a backplane with Single Host Bus Adapter (https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/chassis/3U/SC933.pdf page C-12). What kind of HBA do I need. I have one of these (https://www.ebay.com/itm/153224277440).

The chassis support 15 physical drives and the HP H220 supports 2x4 SATA disks. Does this mean that I kan connect one of the HBA connector on the HP H220 to the backplane of the chassis and then get 15 disks + 4 sata (directly connected to the H220)?
 
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Could you upload a photo of your backplane, specifically the ports on it? Supermicro shipped that chassis with 5 different ones.
 
Blue Fox said:
Could you upload a photo of your backplane, specifically the ports on it? Supermicro shipped that chassis with 5 different ones.
Click to expand...

Ok, I'll try to take a picture later today. I thought there were only to versions on the backplane (reading the manual) and from that information, I could only see 1 HBA port.
 
Blue Fox said:
Could you upload a photo of your backplane, specifically the ports on it? Supermicro shipped that chassis with 5 different ones.
Click to expand...

It’s a SC933EL1
B8C27128-E1B7-445A-A218-5CE50B1D2C30.jpeg 5AA12BD9-9776-4531-835A-F24C92862568.jpeg
 
Alright, so, that's the SAS1 backplane and means you have an SC933E1-R760. You can use just about any SAS HBA (including the HP one you asked about) with this, however, the LSI SAS1 expanders (under the black heatsink on the backplane) had compatibility issues with large drives. I would not recommend using anything larger than 2TB. Your scenario of hooking up one cable to the backplane and using the other port for 4 more disks would work.
 
Blue Fox said:
Alright, so, that's the SAS1 backplane and means you have an SC933E1-R760. You can use just about any SAS HBA (including the HP one you asked about) with this, however, the LSI SAS1 expanders (under the black heatsink on the backplane) had compatibility issues with large drives. I would not recommend using anything larger than 2TB. Your scenario of hooking up one cable to the backplane and using the other port for 4 more disks would work.
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge! So this means when using one of the ports, the expander with give access to all 15 drives? What’s the drawbacks? I would guess performance...

Actually, I was hoping to use this for my nas, which now have a mix of 3 and 4 tb disks... no chance for firmware upgrade to gain stability or do you another chassis you would recommend?
 
Using a single port, bandwidth would be limited to 1200MB/s for all 15 disks. You could use both to double that.

As for upgrading the firmware or any sort of fix, unfortunately you're out of luck as far as I'm aware.

I personally use lots of Supermicro hardware myself and recommend them if you're interested in something else. You just have a 10 year old model, hence the issues. How many 3.5" bays would you need?
 
I see. I can still use this one for my old disks as an offline backup system.

I need for at least 12 3,5" bays...
 
Well, in the Supermicro world, you're looking at the 826, 836, and 846 chassis for 12, 16, and 24 bays respectively. All are fairly common on eBay. Just make sure you get the SAS2 backplane if you want to use a single HBA for all the ports. The SAS2 one supports double the speeds of the SAS1 one and doesn't have issues with large disks.
 
Maybe a silly question: will it be possible to just buy a backplane from 8*6 and swap it using the sc966 chassis?
 
Unfortunately that won't work. The drives on the 933 are oriented vertically, while the 8x6 models are horizontal. Supermicro seldom has 3.5" drives vertically now.
 
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