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SAS Expander Questions

F

Franko

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 17, 2009
Messages
121
I own a Supermicro X10SL7-f (flashed to IT mode) and want to know if I can use reverse breakout cables to connect the onboard raid controller to an Intel raid expander (RES2SV240) to be able to control a Norco 4220 that has 5 backplanes with 1 SFF-8087 port per backplane.

Can I plug one or both channels from the raid controller into the expander?

If I can choose to plug one or two channels into the expander are there any pros and cons?

Thanks for the help in advance.

P.S. I will be purchasing the expander and if anyone has a suggestion other than the Intel I would welcome suggestions.

edit---------
I forgot to add that I intend to use this setup for a FreeNAS build running a ZFS array.
 
Last edited:
Yes to all questions. You're actually not using "both" channels, you're using all 8. Each multilane cable actually does 4 channels. If you use all 8 channels, you actually will run out of ports seeing as the Intel SAS expander only has 24 lanes.
 
You gain some extra speed, if needed, but if your using spinning disks, that is unlikely to be able to acheave that speed.

For redundancy, you only gain if you have a broken cable.
 
Using 1 cable you will have 2400MB/s. Divided out across 20 disks that's 120MB/s per disk which is enough unless you have 20 7200RPM disks all going at once at full speed and even then the limit would be slight.

It's funny you mention these parts. I have exactly the same 3 parts and yep it works as you would expect. I'm using it with ZFS on Debian.
 
I can also vouch for the board in combination with the expander. I used the dual channel connection for a while, but found that it is not worth it as long as you only use 6Gbps drives (3Gbps drives slow down the connections when they transmit/receive). I now use the other 4 channels for some fast SSDs.
 
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