Lurker Needing Advice

[Titus]

I been lurking for about a year now. Finally got myself and sold all old equipment to get a single supermicro 24bay. I just got home from leave and a coworker hooked me up with supermicro aoc-s3008l-l8e but the issue is the server I have is a bpn-sas2-846el inside a cse-846 case. I would love to use the free card but its sas3 and bp is sas2. I would love to upgrade the backplane to a sas3 but funds gone until wife's car if paid off (per our agreement) I run 12x ST8000NM0075 which are 12 gbps (currently 6gbps in current setup) and looking to upgrade cache drives whenever I upgrade backplane to sas3. My question is do i need to get a sas2 hba for now or can I use the sas3 hba to sas2 bp. Hate to spend more than I have to just wondering if it was possible

 

[j_h_o]

Using a SAS3 adapter to a SAS2 backplane will work just fine.

You'll probably need an SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 cable.

 

[Titus]

Looks perfect. Thanks I guess I should just put in some overtime to get teh sas3 backplane and be done with the sever other than buying more hard drives.

 

[j_h_o]

What speed is your network?

If you're putting in spinning drives, it's questionable what the benefit of 12Gbps might be... You haven't said much about your software set up, but depending on what SSDs you're using as cache, there might be some benefit.

Even if you have a 10Gbps or faster network, I'd probably get some NVMe cache connected to PCIe instead of trying to get a 12Gbps backplane with those Seagates you listed.