Hi all,

 

I'm in the process of putting together a machine and need advice on cables to attach SAS drives to the motherboard. I've never worked with SAS before, but I've got a motherboard that supports it and was gifted 11 SAS drives, and I want to make use of them. I've got two questions:

 

1. I've purchased the X10SL7-F which has a built-in SAS controller but with what looks like SATA connectors. Am I right in assuming I need these cables from AliExpress to connect it to a SAS drive?

 

https://imgur.com/t4a9TBG

 

2. If I buy a Dell H310 controller for even more drives, what cables do I need for those? Something like this? What I'm confused about is how I can attach the power to the SAS drives. Can I plug this into a drive alongside a power cable, and it'll work fine?

 

https://imgur.com/Q248IXS

Normally you never directly connect a SAS Drive to a Motherboard. Usually you have Hot Swap Cages where you slide them in.

(This would avoid a lot of single cables flying around)

 

1) If your MoBo does offer SATA-like connectors like yours, you need the cables that you have shown first, but of course, you also need a powercable for every drive (I said, A LOT of cabling...)

These are uncritical, each side is directly visible.

 

2) Much more problematic are the 2nd ones. There are several types of them, "normal" and "reverse". What type you need depends on where what connector is.

In your case, with directly attached disks, none of them are correct.

 

You would need a cable like this:

(dont ask me where you can get them, I only know that they exist)

 

 

Edited March 14, 20224 yr by Michael Meiszl