The configuration I am building will be for 12 Drives in a 3U case giving 3 rows of 4 drives. The case has an internal backplane that connects to the 12 SATA hot swap drives, powers them, and provides signal paths.  Each row of 4 drives terminates on the back plane in a mini SAS connector (SFF-8087).  There do not seem to be any active components on the backplane, that is it appears to be a passive backplane. The backplane also incoroporates 4 hot swap 80mm fans with failure detection and temp monitoring.

 

I am planning to connect two rows of the back plane (8 drives) to the Supermicro AOC SASLP-MV8 HBA using two SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables (one for each row).  The third row (4 drives), I will connect to 4 of the 5 Motherboard SATA ports using a reverse breakout cable that has a SFF-8087 at one end and 4 SATA connectors at the other. I was told exactly which breakout cable to use when I discussed it with a tech at PC-Pitstop, a really good source of info.

 

Initially I plan to use 4 drives so the question is where/how to connect them?

    1) All to the Motherboard

    2) All to one connector on the HBA card 

    3) Split the drives with some on the Motherboard some on the HBA

for (3) above where should the parity drive be? or does it not matter at all

For only 4 drives, it probably will not matter where they go right now.

I would consider testing all slots with the 4 drives so you are not surprised later.

After that I might consider moving the parity drive to one of less used component paths to see if it improves parity speed (until you get more drives).

I'd stick parity and a data drive on the MB and one further data drive on each wide port of the SM MV8.

 

This should in theory give the best performance, however with only four drives it's gonna be fast wherever they connect.

 

With twelve bays and only four drives you can try all the combos and report back which works best!