I have a LFF 12-bay Dell R720xd with the dual 2.5" rear drive bays. I saw another member replaced the 8-bay SFF front backplane in his R720 with the R730 SAS3 backplane with no issues and wondered if it was just because it is a "dumb" backplane vs the one in the xd with the built in expander chip.
Can I swap out the front and rear backplanes on the R720xd with the SAS3 ones out of a R730xd and replace the LSI9207 with a HBA330 to get SAS3 speeds for the drive bays? Or will the server reject it and either not power it up or refuse to boot?
Or could I just replace the rear 2-bay backplane with the R730xd one and run it off one of the HBA330 connectors and then use the other connector to the front backplane (knowing that I will only get 4 channels of SAS2 speed for the front 12 spinning drives) to get SAS3 performance out of the rear 2 bays?
Or is there another way to get a clean setup with SAS3 speeds on this server?
Can I swap out the front and rear backplanes on the R720xd with the SAS3 ones out of a R730xd and replace the LSI9207 with a HBA330 to get SAS3 speeds for the drive bays? Or will the server reject it and either not power it up or refuse to boot?
Or could I just replace the rear 2-bay backplane with the R730xd one and run it off one of the HBA330 connectors and then use the other connector to the front backplane (knowing that I will only get 4 channels of SAS2 speed for the front 12 spinning drives) to get SAS3 performance out of the rear 2 bays?
Or is there another way to get a clean setup with SAS3 speeds on this server?