DIY backplane pcb

[orson]

Hi.

I have a bunch of those 5.25" to 3.5" SATA SAS HDD Hard Drive Cage Adapter Tray Caddy Rack Bracket For 3x 5.25" CD ROM Slot Internal or External PC DIY-in Computer Cables & Connectors from Computer & Office on Aliexpress.com | Alibaba Group in my storage servers. They are cheap, they work and did I mentioned that they are cheap? Only problem is that if I have 3 of them on a case that is 15+ drives to manage cables for. I fixed power cables by making my own 5sata to custom plug from modular power supply (modular power supplies ftw!) but data cables are hard to mod. I am thinking about making custom, simple pcb with sata/sff-8087+power on one side and pcb mountable sata + power connectors (like this: SATA connector female 7P+15P 22Pin 15+7 SMT Connector socket 90 degree for SATA hard disk interface 22pin , PCB board -in Computer Cables & Connectors from Computer & Office on Aliexpress.com | Alibaba Group) Only issue I have is to find information do I need any chip to convert 8087 to 4 sata ? 8087 is 36 and sata data has 7 (36/4 = 9). Is this a straight connection of pins from 8087 to pins in sata data cable ? Or do I need something more ?

Thank you and have a nice day.

 

[Aestr]

Full disclosure this is not my area of expertise so everything I share is purely Googling. Also I would not recommend custom PCBs to handle data signals if you really care about this data. The money you save is minimal compared to the potential headache of lost/corrupt data.

That out of the way this document shows the pinout for an SFF-8087 cable and it looks like there's a direct mapping for transmit and receive pairs for each SATA cable so you shouldn't need any logic chips.

 

[orson]

Hi.

Thank you for that document! I was looking for something exactly like this!

I know that messing with high frequency pcb is not an easy task but I recently did a board with multiple HDMI paths and it works fine As long as You don't cross the streams and keep tracks same length it should be fine

Thanks again.