SATA SAS and Compatibility

W

Wang191

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 30, 2000
Messages
2,026
I recently purchased a Norco multiple hard drive chassis with SAS connectors. I had purchased a SAS to SATA cable adapter and tried to connect it to the SATA connectors on the motherboard. I then plugged in a SATA hard drive into the system and nothing happened. The system doesn't see it.

Through research I see that SAS drives are not compatible with SATA but I'm using SATA drives. Is the protocol being used by the SAS connector and whatever the backplane is causing the incompatibility?

I was expecting this to work because the drives are SATA and even though they are attached to the system through a SAS connector I figured it would work.

This is my first dance with anything SAS.
 
You're not using SAS at all (protocol wise). Norco just happens to use SAS connectors to simply cabling as the backplanes have no logic in them. Your problem is the fact that unfortunately multilane breakout cables like the ones you're using are directional. You presumably have forward cables when you need reverse.
 
It's kind of like this, I have a USA outlet, and a USA appliance, but I don't have a cable long enough to connect them, so I used a europian extention cable.

It will work just fine, assuming you buy the correct adapters so everything plugs in, the problem is your adapter is backwards.

SATA motherboard -> cable -> backplane -> SATA disk, it will talk sata the whole way, no problem. But the cables can not be used in both directions, so you have to get the correct one. A Reverse breakout cable connects many sata ports on a motherboard to a single SFF-8087 on a disk backplane (the fact that SFF-8087 is NORMALLY used for SAS, doesn't matter).
 
Oh that's great news. I thought I was going to have to order a new case. I will look for the correct cables....and learn some more about this now that I know they are directional.

Thank you for the information.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top