Waiting for mine to arrive. The original post at STH was for the NVME/U.2 with oculink version, but that sold out quickly (and I don’t have Oculink, and didn’t want to spend $100+ for the PCIe oculink card and drives etc).
This 8x2.5" SAS was reposted and can be bought from $70-80 before shipping depending on the mood of the seller. It seems that these require SFF-8643 to whatever interface your HBA is. I will post some pics when the unit arrives.
$125 OBO + shipping.
EDIT: I offered $60 and got a counter for less than $80. Don’t pay full price on this.
Just FYI, it has nothing to do with whether it’s a “legit” backplane or not. Some models have it, some don’t.
Mostly they are used for failover, but sometimes they can be use for daisy chaining as well. In this case, you would plug in a second backplane directly into the secondary ports of the first backplane.
I finally got the correct SAS cable to connect it to my LSI 8i. Tested fine with a 2.5" sata drive I had. I’m waiting on SAS drives to arrive.
My plan is to use this with a flashed Dell H330 to get “full 12g SAS speed” but I’m using sas spinners and nothing I run will need that much speed. Still, it’s a chance to get ready for chia-pocalypse when people start selling their overprovisioned stuff. Hopefully the SAS SSD’s that come out of this aren’t completely wrecked.
Meanwhile, about this cage. If you have 2.5" drives laying around, it’s not a bad purchase. It’s quiet and quaint. No fan mounts. The 4-pin power supply was the biggest challenge, I had to test it in a different computer than my NAS that had an extra 4-pin cable.
