How do I set this SAS config up?

[dbxuau]

I need some serious help, I'm beyond stuck. I just bought myself a 2U chassis that accepts SAS drives and plugs into a hotplug SAS backplane. On the inside of the chassis, there appears to be 2 SATA ports per harddrive. I have 2 cables that go from a SFF-8087 to discrete sata and I assume the 8087 part goes into my raid card (3ware lsi 8x sas). I drew up a diagram to help display what I'm stumped on below. There are 6 drives in question.

How do I wire this whole thing up and get it to work? Thanks a million guys.

 

[Blue Fox]

If you didn't notice, SAS drives have 2 ports. Since you aren't going to be using both ports on each drive, you plug the breakout cable into one of the ports. Doesn't matter which.

 

[dbxuau]

Ah I think I understand now. When would be a scenario where I would use both ports? From what I see now, I simply go from the raid card and each drive gets a sata cable connected. These particular cables that I have also have a "sideband" connector. What is that used for, if at all?

 

[Blue Fox]

You use both ports when you want redundancy/high-availability. Sideband is used for backplanes that have logic to show things like disk location and failures.

 

[dbxuau]

Is there a clearcut way to see if my particular backplane has said logic? Also, when I first boot this thing up, the raid config page should show all the drives online I'm hoping right?

 

[Blue Fox]

It will be advertised as such and you will have one large backplane for all the drives along with some extra chips to enable the functionality I mentioned. The one you have has no logic. You should see all the drives on first boot in the RAID controller's BIOS setup.

 

[dbxuau]

Interesting. The backplane I have is infact one large piece that covers the whole backside behind the hotplug slots. I guess I dont really need it but sounded interesting. I really appreciate your input so far, very grateful.

 

[J-Will]

OP thanks for the diagram, it helped me as well