I recently bought this card, and put into the 16x PCIe slot of my new SuperMciro motherboard - the same one that Tom uses in his 15 disk servers. I also bought two of these SAS to 4xSATA cables:

 

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=48798&vpn=C-SFF8087-4S&manufacture=Norco%20Technologies%20Inc. I thought I'd checked carefully and got the direction of this cable right - SAS -> SATA.

 

The card itself is recognised, but in the card's BIOS and pre-OS screens, a messages claiming that no physical disks are connected is seen. I've never used the SAS connector before, but it does give a satisfying click when the cable is inserted into the card. Also the same 8 drives work just fine connected to the two TX4 cards in PCI slots - which I was hoping to do away with after getting the Supermicro PCIe card.

 

Any suggestions?

 

[EDIT] Never mind - it IS the wrong cable it seems. I got fixated on this cable when I thought I'd be buying a Norco 4220 case.

[EDIT 2] The title description of the cable (breakout) is different from the description in the body of the text (reverse breakout). I'll take it up with NCIX.

Yep, wrong cable.  The term 'breakout' can mean either 'forward breakout' or 'reverse breakout'.  I agree that just using the term 'breakout' without the modifier is very confusing.  I wouldn't say NCIX got it wrong, since they did specify in the product details, but I agree that they should make it very clear in the product name which one it is.

 

If NCIX won't take it back, you could offer it up in the good deals section.  People make this mistake all the time, so you may get lucky and find someone who bought the forward cable by mistake.