xelthian

Forgive me if this has been discovered before, but I didn't see it in a search, so here it is. I ran into this with my current build. I decided to get a couple of Seagate Exos SAS drives to use as parity drives (because, you know, why not?). I've never worked with SAS Drives before, and the first hurdle I ran into was the connector. After realizing that standard SATA data/power cables just don't connect to the drive (learned a lot on this build), I picked up the right cables with the SAS connector which had a SATA power adapter as part of the connector. My LSI 9300 8i arrived, and I dutifully hooked up my SAS drives via the cable, plugged in the SATA power cables from my power supply, and powered the server on. Neither of the SAS drives were recognized. I won't bore you with all the troubleshooting steps I went through, but I ran into the same power issue others seem to have (3.3v SAS power issue is what ended up searching for successfully). One poster noted that this might be why you see so many of these SAS cables with Molex power connectors instead of SATA power connectors like I had, as a standard SATA power connector won't work. "Great," I thought. "Now I have to get a different cable." And then, a thought occurred to me. In my bag of odds and ends I had a Molex-to-2-SATA power adapter. I wasn't confident it would work, but you know, I had it, and it was easy enough to test. So I unplugged the SATA power connectors, plugged in a Molex cable into my power supply, plugged in the adapter, connected the adapted SATA power connectors to the SAS drive connector adapters, and powered on the server. And wouldn't you know it, the drives powered up and were recognized by the SAS card. So if you find yourself with the wrong SATA-powered SAS cables like I did, don't fret: break out your neglected Molex connectors and invest in a simple Molex-to-SATA adapter, and you'll be in business!