Help me choose the correct SC216 variant ... 2U / 26 drive Supermicro chassis ...

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bford

New Member
Apr 29, 2021
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Hello,

We would like a 2U chassis with the 24+2 drive slots.

We also need 7x half-height low-profile slots.

Finally, we are using plain old sata3 2.5" SSDs for ZFS L2ARC and SLOG, etc., so we need the ports to accept *both* SATA and SAS.

So I THINK that the correct variant for us is:

216BE1C-R920LPB

... since that has an expander that we can connect a proper HBA to, will accept SATA and SAS, has 7x LP slots and has the 25th and 26th drive slots on the back for our boot mirror.

It seems like the right one ... however, the one minor question/issue is ... do I need to connect a single 24port HBA to the entire front backplane ?

I would much rather split the backplane in half and use *two* HBAs ... maybe two 9305-16i cards and control 12 slots with each of them ?

Or is there only one SAS port for the entire 24 drive backplane ?

Thanks.
 
Last edited:

nthu9280

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2016
1,628
498
83
San Antonio, TX
You would need chassis with sas216a backplane. It would need 3x 8i HBAs or 16i & 8i. Typically a 16i is more expensive than 2x8i but you save a pcie slot.
 

bford

New Member
Apr 29, 2021
11
0
1
You would need chassis with sas216a backplane. It would need 3x 8i HBAs or 16i & 8i. Typically a 16i is more expensive than 2x8i but you save a pcie slot.
Oh, OK - so I don't want an expander at all, I want a SAS backplane with direct attach ... SFF-8087 I suppose ?

OK, I see that this variant:

216BAC-R920LPB

Has this backplane:

BPN-SAS3-216A

Does that sound correct to you ?

Yes, think I will get 2x 16 port cards and save the pcie slot ...