Broadcom 9500-8i, NVME U.2/U.3, Tri-Mode
- Thread starter john389
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Not sure what you're referring to.
The cable has 1x SlimSAS 8i, 8x 8482 and 8x 4-Pin Molex for power (one for each drive)
@Jdok: How many drives of which type are you trying to connect? Are you sure that this is the cable you want/need?
Those two 8-pin connectors are present on the cable, I just checked on the two I own. My guess - I didn't look it up and never connected them - they are for connecting status LEDs that could be found on drive enclosures. Not connecting them never presented a problem for me.
Those two 8-pin connectors are present on the cable, I just checked on the two I own. My guess - I didn't look it up and never connected them - they are for connecting status LEDs that could be found on drive enclosures. Not connecting them never presented a problem for me.
I don't think you'll have problems connecting them, at least I had no issues connecting Seagate SAS drives. For U.2 or U.3 I'd have suggested looking elsewhere. Just checked again, the cable LSI PN number matches the cables I have. So, should be all good. Have fun!
I am doing just this with an old gen 8 microserver to get some internal NVMe SSDs in addition to the onboard 3.5 spinners. Price isn't a huge concern. Should I be looking at a 9400, 9500 or 9600 tri-mode card?
I would say 9500. It's less power-hungry than the 9600, but doesn't seem to have as awful of a cable situation. I'm not 100% sure since I haven't tried it, but I think the 9500 series can work with standard cabling whereas the 9400 uses a proprietary pinout for NVMe and thus requires special cables (which they charge a lot for). The 9500 spec sheet specifically claims support for SFF-9402 standard pinouts. 9500 also has the advantage of being PCIe 4.0 on the host side and for downstream NVMe drives.
two general troubleshootings for sas drives not recognized.
3.3v problem: These may be old drives and not have the problem but they might. Surest way to make sure they don't get 3.3v power is to have your power splitter cable that either doesn't have the 3.3v wire at all or cut the 3.3v power (do it on a cheap splitter not your power supply). The kaptan tape thing is too finicky for me.
520 or other bytes. if these were refurbished from a place like IBM or EMC they may have a 520 byte or 526 byte format that makes them unrecognizable. Can be fixed with the sg3-utils and sg_format command.
3.3v problem: These may be old drives and not have the problem but they might. Surest way to make sure they don't get 3.3v power is to have your power splitter cable that either doesn't have the 3.3v wire at all or cut the 3.3v power (do it on a cheap splitter not your power supply). The kaptan tape thing is too finicky for me.
520 or other bytes. if these were refurbished from a place like IBM or EMC they may have a 520 byte or 526 byte format that makes them unrecognizable. Can be fixed with the sg3-utils and sg_format command.