SFF-8484 36-Pin to Mini SAS SFF-8087 32-Pin Cable trouble in old Aeon Chassis

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Before AEON was a form of bitcoin it was a system integrator that stuck supermicro motherboards in a chassis Aeon made. Documentation is non existent. My first entry with a server was to buy an Aeon chassis with 8x3.5 drive slots to use for Freenas. I used the system until I outgrew 8 drives and could not find another similar chassis. I switched to using supermicro chassis. I recently decided to use the old chassis to experiment with Truenas SCALE as all the other machines I have are CORE, So I thought it would be a good play ground.

The Aeon was old enough that it used SFF-8484 36pin connections on the two 4 drive backplanes. These broke out into 4 standard SATA/SAS cables. TheARC1220 RAID controller had 8 SATA connection on it. Because of the lack of IT firmware for that card I replaced it with a Dell card with IT firmware. I used two 4 Sata to SFF-8087 adapters to connect from the drive backplane to the Dell HBA controller. That worked fine but looks like hell.
Here is the problem:
1) Just want to use the stuff I have for my SCALE playground.
2) When resurrecting the server from my junk pile, I replaced the crazy cable setup with two SFF-8484 36-Pin to Mini SAS SFF-8087 32-Pin Cable pictured below that I bought as "new" on eBay
3) On bootup my system does not see any of the drives
4) If I reinstall the Frankenstein cables everything works OK (red cable laying on the keyboard) next to the Amp connector
5) SCALE is installed and a pool created

Are there differences in SFF-8484 36pin cables? At this point I'll probably put the Frankenstein cables back in the chassis but I'd like to know where I went wrong besides using 20+ year old hardware. Perhaps AEON did some proprietary tricks?
It is confusing because the connection to the Backplane has 32 pins but the mini SAS has 36. So there are no extra pins for customization. The pinout of the Aeon must use the same connector but not the same pinout. I hope someone might have Aeon documentation. It might be possible to modify the AMP connector if only a few are jumbled. I found the attached document that describes two configurations one "with Sideband" and one without, I do not see the AMP connector described as having "sideband". What is this? Is this what the Aeon backplane is expecting?

 

[ziggygt]

Before AEON was a form of bitcoin it was a system integrator that stuck supermicro motherboards in a chassis Aeon made. Documentation is non existent. My first entry with a server was to buy an Aeon chassis with 8x3.5 drive slots to use for Freenas. I used the system until I outgrew 8 drives and could not find another similar chassis. I switched to using supermicro chassis. I recently decided to use the old chassis to experiment with Truenas SCALE as all the other machines I have are CORE, So I thought it would be a good play ground.

The Aeon was old enough that it used SFF-8484 36pin connections on the two 4 drive backplanes. These broke out into 4 standard SATA/SAS cables. TheARC1220 RAID controller had 8 SATA connection on it. Because of the lack of IT firmware for that card I replaced it with a Dell card with IT firmware. I used two 4 Sata to SFF-8087 adapters to connect from the drive backplane to the Dell HBA controller. That worked fine but looks like hell.
Here is the problem:
1) Just want to use the stuff I have for my SCALE playground.
2) When resurrecting the server from my junk pile, I replaced the crazy cable setup with two SFF-8484 36-Pin to Mini SAS SFF-8087 32-Pin Cable pictured below that I bought as "new" on eBay
3) On bootup my system does not see any of the drives
4) If I reinstall the Frankenstein cables everything works OK (red cable laying on the keyboard) next to the Amp connector
5) SCALE is installed and a pool created

Are there differences in SFF-8484 36pin cables? At this point I'll probably put the Frankenstein cables back in the chassis but I'd like to know where I went wrong besides using 20+ year old hardware. Perhaps AEON did some proprietary tricks?
It is confusing because the connection to the Backplane has 32 pins but the mini SAS has 36. So there are no extra pins for customization. The pinout of the Aeon must use the same connector but not the same pinout. I hope someone might have Aeon documentation. It might be possible to modify the AMP connector if only a few are jumbled. I found the attached document that describes two configurations one "with Sideband" and one without, I do not see the AMP connector described as having "sideband". What is this? Is this what the Aeon backplane is expecting?

This describes the sideband definitions, but it was not clear to me what can be done.

https://members.snia.org/document/dl/25904

There are 7 pins on each of the 4 SATA connectors. So that is 28 pins. but some of the grounds are shared. That leaves 8 pins not assigned. Perhaps Aeon just jumbled the pinout. Perhaps that is why they disappeared.

This is the SFF-8484 pinout SAS_4i_internal_SFF-8484.jpg (860×1764) (pinoutguide.com) I'll try to ring the cable to confirm they both have the same data connections.

I took apart the connectors of my red working cable and the non working cable. You can see below that the new non working cable has connections to all the sideband pins but the red non working cables does not. I cut the traces on the non working cable, still no joy. I deduced that the secret must be in the other end on the mini-sas side. That does not come apart, but I found a cable pinout in a bing search (below). The cable diagrams attached seem to show nothing special with the 8 unsed backchannel pins. I rang the cable at it seems to match the drawing, but it does not work even for a single Sata drive. I am perplexed.

this is a similar thread. Where someone had problems with the sff-8484 cables.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/source-for-sff-8087-to-sff-8484-w-sideband-cables.16121/