I just bought a used HP Gen8 Microserver and confused on a couple of parts. Server is working fine but have no idea what the function of these parts are. The device in the first photo has a cable that runs to a card in the second photo. Server works fine. 3rd photo has a photo of the external port on the card. Any information greatly appreciated. By the way I removed all those devices as weren’t being used 
Esata?
Can’t make out the first photo hardly at all but the external facing port appears to be coming off the same PCIe? card that the internal drives are connected to with an 8087 SAS style port. So. I’m guessing it’s an HBA with an external 8088 port
It loos like SFF-8088 to me. It’s for connecting an external storage enclosure.
Yes I think you are correct but it’s also but the device hooked to one side is some type of battery backup but not really a battery. More like a capacitor that holds a charge. Oh well I removed all of it as not necessary for my needs.
That’s probably a BBU for the RAID card.
If you provided some images with some more pixels in them, it would be a lot easier to help out!
How much did you remove… it kinda looks like it manages the hard drive connections
I removed everything in the photos. Now using 4 sata drives and removing those 3 devices has had no effect on operation. The 4 sata ports working fine. On the pcie slot I installed an intel nic card as I am running Xpenology os and it didn’t recognize the built-in network connections. By the way if your not familiar with Xpenology it’s a modified version of Synology which works so great for my needs.
