Reusing HP backplane in PC, wiring power

[dmc]

I want to build small NAS with 8x 2.5" sata SSD + yet another backplane with 4x 3.5" drives. I prepared mainboard with 12x sata ports and found out that HP 2.5" backplane is not working (3.5" connects all drives).

This is that HP backplane, easily found by hp # 660348-001


hp # 660348-001 with cable

I used mini SAS cable to 4x SATA cable, something like this one:



and tried to power up backplane with both 12V and 5V (+GND), mainly connecting molex and sata port to factory cable, checked with multimeter and all voltages are on the backplane wired to all drives.

This is factory power cable for this backplane and server:


HP 667259-001

I don't know what to do with gray, orange and green cable, do anybody have pinout? Maybe some of them are SMBus or SGPIO but those should not be needed to init drives.
There is a chance that my mini sas to sata cable is wrong for this setup, any advice? I need sata on the other end.

My goal is to connect all drives via sata, power up them and see those in system, use whole thing in much smaller and energy efficient build than big HP proliant.

Any advice?

 

[nexox]

Not all SAS breakout cables are the same, for this you specifically need a reverse breakout cable, if you got a regular one it won't work.

 

[dmc]

Not all SAS breakout cables are the same, for this you specifically need a reverse breakout cable, if you got a regular one it won't work.

This is why I attached photo of this cable, I know that some are directional and won't work.
Can You please point me to correct one? I need mini-sas on one end and sata for the other.

 

[sko]

Is that a SAS backplane? Wiring that to SATA ports won't work...

 

[nexox]

Unfortunately you can't tell the two kinds of breakout cable apart by just looking at them since it's just a tiny internal wiring difference.

Not necessarily endorsing this one specifically, but it does say it's reverse: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-50cm-SFF-8087-4x-SATA/dp/B008KF73CA/

 

[dmc]

I will get reverese SATA cable and re-test this one.
This part is most important for setup - this cage without communication is just useless for me
Do anybody know what is pinout for mini-sas to sata and mini-sas to reverse sata?

Edit: I found out few articles about those with explanation why there are send/receive pins, this seems to be clear now. The only thing I'm still missing is information about sideband in mini-sas port.

 

[roberth58]

I will get reverese SATA cable and re-test this one.
This part is most important for setup - this cage without communication is just useless for me
Do anybody know what is pinout for mini-sas to sata and mini-sas to reverse sata?

Edit: I found out few articles about those with explanation why there are send/receive pins, this seems to be clear now. The only thing I'm still missing is information about sideband in mini-sas port.

Why would you use a breakout cable to connect a backplane, it does the breakout. hookup a LSI 8i HBA to your backplane using 2 minisas cables, also SAS HBA will work with SAS or SATA.

 

[nexox]

Why would you use a breakout cable to connect a backplane, it does the breakout.

They want to connect the backplane to their onboard SATA ports, as stated in the first post, that's what a reverse breakout is made for.

 

[roberth58]

They want to connect the backplane to their onboard SATA ports, as stated in the first post, that's what a reverse breakout is made for.

OK, missed that. Never occured that he wants to use the motherboard SATA ports. However an HBA would be a lot more flexible in the future allowing for SAS drives, easy passthrough in Proxmox etc and would probably have been cheaper. an LSI 8i card and 2 sff8087 cables would be less than $40 on ebay versus the 2 wrong breakout cables and the 2 correct reverse breakout cables. Just a thought.

 

[nexox]

OK, missed that. Never occured that he wants to use the motherboard SATA ports. However an HBA would be a lot more flexible in the future allowing for SAS drives, easy passthrough in Proxmox etc and would probably have been cheaper. an LSI 8i card and 2 sff8087 cables would be less than $40 on ebay versus the 2 wrong breakout cables and the 2 correct reverse breakout cables. Just a thought.

Indeed, an HBA makes a lot of sense for a lot of situations, but it adds power consumption, uses a PCIe slot, requires some cooling, I can see why people might be happy with the ports on the motherboard.

 

[dmc]

Hello,
just an update,

I quickly order suggested cable, there were two available here locally, each one too long for me and without sideband (that I also wanted to use at some stage). I ordered one of them just for tests because I expected to have it shortly. Few days later I got this cable, but it was not sealed inside and no detailed specs printed on it. It looked exactly the same as my first cable, just longer. I quickly connected it and found out that it's still not working, same effect - no drive detected.

But hey, I already learned something, if I should have at that time both forward and reverse cable then they should not have same pinout. At this time i knew that one of cable should have rx and tx swapped for each SATA port and that was NOT true for those cables (tested with multimeter) - I was sure at this point that they sent me wrong cable so I need yet another try.
This time I found on ali perfect cable - short, reverse and with sideband. It took one week for delivery, but I was able to quickly re-test my setup - and this time IT WORKED as expected. I made test with one port and all four drives were visible on system.

To power up backplane all I needed was to connect original cable to molex or sata, those provide both 5V and 12V and are connected directly with backplane sata ports. There is power led on board and it light up when power is connected. For now none of drive bay leds are working and I expect that I need to use sideband signals for that, I'll make new topic about that, this one is resolved, with right cable I got sata drives visible in system. I still got one or two lines not connected in power plug but they may be not needed.

 

[dmc]

OK, missed that. Never occured that he wants to use the motherboard SATA ports. However an HBA would be a lot more flexible in the future allowing for SAS drives, easy passthrough in Proxmox etc and would probably have been cheaper. an LSI 8i card and 2 sff8087 cables would be less than $40 on ebay versus the 2 wrong breakout cables and the 2 correct reverse breakout cables. Just a thought.

This is home build, completely not professional, with some almost random parts, just for fun. I was curious what can I do with server backplanes, they are cheap and solid, but as You could see I need to take care about few things. SAS card is some option, but for now I'll go with very simple, double ASM1166 card, just because I expect smaller size (maybe not cables, but for whole setup) and lower power consumption. This is not final choice yet and I need some tests to see results.

 

[roberth58]

This is home build, completely not professional, with some almost random parts, just for fun. I was curious what can I do with server backplanes, they are cheap and solid, but as You could see I need to take care about few things. SAS card is some option, but for now I'll go with very simple, double ASM1166 card, just because I expect smaller size (maybe not cables, but for whole setup) and lower power consumption. This is not final choice yet and I need some tests to see results.

Watch out for those 1166 cards they can have problems dropping drives on bootup. They also have half the bandwidth of even an old gen2 HBA. If you plan on using Unraid that wont matter but it could impact performance in Truenas.

 

[dmc]

Watch out for those 1166 cards they can have problems dropping drives on bootup. They also have half the bandwidth of even an old gen2 HBA. If you plan on using Unraid that wont matter but it could impact performance in Truenas.

I know this and stability is something that I need to test for sure. If this will be problematic I'll need to reconsider this particular part, but first I'll need to take some tests, try different firmwares and tweak everything. HBA cards are usually very big compared to ASM1166, they also take way more power and produce more heat. I also have very limited i/o on this build so HBA will not benefit much at this.

At this stage I have sata disks ready to use in system, now next part is to make control leds working. For now only power led is turned on at backplane (I Igot about four different, same thing on all of them). This is not that important as first step, but I would like to explore this topic. Yet again probably this would just work with HBA card, but with asmedia this can be hard. I got cable with sideband, now I need to figure out pinout. On second backplane cable has additional connector with "sgpio" label. Also I can find SMBus, UART and RCS (?) connector. How to connect all of those? I can add controller with i2c and uart lines to make some communication. One backplane has only two leds for each drive (probably activity, power/error), the one from HP (as in picture) has 7 pin connector to drive caddy (probably can show more status codes).

Yet again - this is experimental build, for fun and to learn something. It will never be close to anything professional.