Raid card: Cable question

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kyoko

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Feb 16, 2011
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Heya, a friend donated me a HP P400. It has 2 SFF 8484 ports

now i have found some cables (on amazon)
" SAS Cable SFF-8087 to SFF-8484"
so... does this mean, the raid card needs SFF 8087 and the backplane SFF-8484?

Or does it not matter at all, as long as both ends fit it'll work?

anyone here know?

let me know.
 
shouldn't matter at all.

for sas cables, there are very limited ones that matter what end goes to drives and what end goes to hosts.
 
A good way of looking at this is: what do you intend to use with the card?
an external enclosure? an internal hot-swap drive assembly? directly attach to disks?

What you intend to do with the card and what equipment you happen to use will define what kind of cable you get, i would personally source the equipment you want to use before sourcing the cables.

your quickest bang for buck if you want to just play around and directly attach a few drives to the card would be an SFF-8484 to 4x SFF-8482 breakout cable (should work to attach SATA or SAS drives) or an SFF-8484 to 4x "SATA" breakout cable (SATA drives and certain hot swap arrays only).

generally speaking, all of the peripherals (HBA, Backplane up-stream connector, drives) are the same 'gender', and cables are the other mating 'gender', so it generally won't matter which way the cable is plugged in so long as all devices use the same connector type. Backplanes can be purchased with SFF-8087, SFF-8484, SATA, and probably other connectors as well, if you point out what equipment you intend to hook up we may be able to give you some assistance in finding a good price on the proper cabling.
 
Depend as others have said, what you want to hook the p400 up to...
Direct to drives, or too a backplane.

But either way you want to be looking for sff-8484 ( host ) to either sata or sff-8087 ( Target )

Host being the controller, target being either the drives.... An expander.... Or a backplane.

Getting cables that are made sff-8484 ( target ) won't work for you.

.
 
@stanza33 there are (or have been) some very rare target devices with SFF-8484 connections.
 
For sure there are sff-8484 target devices... ie backplanes... But in the OP's case the sff-8484 on his p400 controller will be the host end....

If he purchases cables either breaking out into sata... Or to sff-8087 minisas with the sff-8484 wired as target it will not work.

Host and target ends are physically wired different...
 
Thanks for the answers, yes the idea is to go from sff-8484 to a sff-8087 backplane (norco case)
If anyone happens to have a link to a cable that would be able to do that (preferably in europe but any will do). would be nice :)
 
The one i used for a similar setup is eBay item number 400265520932, although the shipping to europe would probably be prohibitive. The only other venues i know of to find these cheaply would be monoprice.com (again probably prohibitive shipping.) Direct shipped from china via eBay may be your best bet.
 
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