I recently acquired a second hand (at least!) chassis with SAS backplanes. I've been having a ton of trouble with it. I first put in a bunch of old SATA drives but they all were constantly erroring and when the did work, they were unusually slow. I then swapped them out and put in 12g SAS drives and they are working much better... but not perfect.
I'm using the chassis as a simple JBOD enclosure and have an HP 12g SAS expander mounted in it. It's a bit non-ideal in that I'm using one of the below to expose two internal connectors as external for connection to my server. I have other chassis that I'm using as JBODs but using SAS expanders with proper external ports. I don't think the reliability is due to janky connectivity because not all drives are impacted equally, which is what I would expect if the connection from the expander to host was flaky.
I don't think it's a power supply issue since I would expect the SAS drives to put more strain on the power side of things. Given that the SAS drives are behaving better than the SATA drives makes me think that the higher signaling voltage of SAS is able to (better) overcome whatever is impacting the signal from the drives to the expander.
The chassis was filthy with dust when I got it. I was shocked by how dirty it was. I used a can-o-air to blow out the connectors but I'm thinking that there may be more grunge in the backplane connectors than just loose dust.
Any suggestions for how to go about thoroughly cleaning the SAS backplane contacts? They're quite small and it's not particularly easy to get anything in there (and get it back out). I've never tried using contact cleaner on anything that small.
I'm using the chassis as a simple JBOD enclosure and have an HP 12g SAS expander mounted in it. It's a bit non-ideal in that I'm using one of the below to expose two internal connectors as external for connection to my server. I have other chassis that I'm using as JBODs but using SAS expanders with proper external ports. I don't think the reliability is due to janky connectivity because not all drives are impacted equally, which is what I would expect if the connection from the expander to host was flaky.
I don't think it's a power supply issue since I would expect the SAS drives to put more strain on the power side of things. Given that the SAS drives are behaving better than the SATA drives makes me think that the higher signaling voltage of SAS is able to (better) overcome whatever is impacting the signal from the drives to the expander.
The chassis was filthy with dust when I got it. I was shocked by how dirty it was. I used a can-o-air to blow out the connectors but I'm thinking that there may be more grunge in the backplane connectors than just loose dust.
Any suggestions for how to go about thoroughly cleaning the SAS backplane contacts? They're quite small and it's not particularly easy to get anything in there (and get it back out). I've never tried using contact cleaner on anything that small.