I am looking to move from a tower to a server. I have some failing ports on my motherboard and SATA pcie card and its time, my current tower holds 10 drives and as I have converted a lot to 8TB drives, I now have 4-5 4TB drives just sitting.

 

Anyways, I have read you need reverse breakout cables for the Norco (4 SATA down to 1) then reverse back to 4. How is this not a major bandwidth bottleneck? And if it is, does it matter? What is the best way to get the most thru-put out of my 24 drives. Sorry if this sounds like a very basic question, my mind is not working today haha.

Edited January 12, 20188 yr by wickedathletes

The Norco I have uses the SFF8087 on the drive bay side, the backplane.  If you have any of the modern HBAs they will use this as well.  I use the default supermicro jbod cards that support 8 drives with 2 "ports", each card services two connections on the 4224 using cables like these (I think I got mine from mono

 

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133034

 

So it depends on your HBA, but you would never do a reverse to a forward, you would do SFF8087 on both sides, or a reverse/forward for whichever side had the single ports....or just SATA cables if both have single ports

Edited January 12, 20188 yr by Tybio