SATA Port Multiplier and 9361-8i

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Falloutboy

Member
Oct 23, 2011
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I have an Avago (Broadcom) 9361-8I SAS controller, I know that there are SAS expanders and I have two on the way but my question is will the 9361-8i work with SATA 1 port in to 5 port out expanders, I would have thought it would be transparent to the OS and to everything else and just worked as SATA over SAS - is this the case?
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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I have not seen any sas cards work with sata port multipliers. Not saying it isn't possible, but I haven't heard of it.
 

Mishka

Active Member
Apr 30, 2017
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London, UK
I dont think any SATA port expander will work, your best bet is grab something like a HP SAS Expander and then use Breakout cables
 

ari2asem

Active Member
Dec 26, 2018
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The Netherlands, Groningen
you can use it, but it recognizes 1 hdd ;)

tried 1 year ago with cheap dell h200 hba it-mode card.

best way is sas expanders. hp sas expanders are cheapest, speed is 3gbps for sata hdd, 6gbps for sas hdd
 

Falloutboy

Member
Oct 23, 2011
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I have been doing some research and apparently most Sata port multipliers need a host/motherboard that is PM ( Port multiplier aware ) but then I found this which states "Supports non-PM aware hosts (Configured as Single Volume RAID)"

So presumably if I attach four SATA 1TB SSD's to it , it will appear as just one SATA drive, being that the Raid controller then only sees one drive and this thing does all the heavy lifting - it might be an answer.

RAID Controller | One to Five SATA Port Multiplier RAID 5 Controller with LCD Module | SPM394
 

Falloutboy

Member
Oct 23, 2011
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that one module you connect on sata-port of your motherboard. the orange port of module to sata port of mainboard
So you don't think that the orange connector could be connected from an SFF to SATA fanout cable, the adapter is taking care of the raid and as far as I can see presents as one drive to the system and not a port multiplier.
 

Aestr

Well-Known Member
Oct 22, 2014
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Seattle
So you don't think that the orange connector could be connected from an SFF to SATA fanout cable, the adapter is taking care of the raid and as far as I can see presents as one drive to the system and not a port multiplier.
How are you hoping the drives will show up to the HBA (and OS)? It's been many years since I had a multiplier like this, but I believe you are correct that it handles the RAID internally, but that means it presents all 5 drives as a single drive to upstream devices. I've never tried plugging one into an HBA, but it's entirely possible it will work as this isn't so much a dumb port multiplier as a very low end RAID card. I have no idea how it passes back data to the RAID configuration software they provide.

If you have SAS expanders on the way you should really wait for them as the performance and experience is going to be significantly better. If you do decide to continue with the SATA modules on top of the SAS controller understand that it's likely to be unpleasant.
 
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