Question 1

What kind of cables are needed to connect to this card. None of the esata cables I have work? A part number would be helpful.

Accepted Answer

The connectors on the back of the card are SFF-8088 mini-SAS External Connectors.  If you are trying to directly connect to bare SATA or SAS hard drives, you need a cable set like Item#: 9SIAFJV6SF5493 here on Newegg.  This cable set will go from the back of the card to 4 separate bare hard drives.  You also will need to provide power via the 4 pin molex connector on the cable set for each of the 4 drives.

If you need to connect to external hard drives with esata connectors, use a cable set like Item#: 9SIA27C1S19893, which goes from one SFF-8088 connector on the back of the card to up to 4 hard drives with esata connections.  Power for the hard drives must come from the enclosure containing the drive.

They make SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 cables that are used to connect to other external enclosures that can contain multiple hard drive like in server racks.

You can connect up to 4 of these cable sets, each supporting up to 4 hard drives, allowing you to connect 16 total hard drives.

Question 2

Would this product support USB 3.0? I have exact the same product that is currently installed on our servers to read/write data from the external hard drives. We are using  4way eSATA cables to connect up to 16 external hard drives. Do you have mini 3.0 or standard 3.0 cables that can connect to this adapter?

Accepted Answer

This is SAS/SATA only, to do that You'll need a USB card and USB has much higher latency that does SAS/SATA.

What you really want to do is buy an enclosure for these drives that has sas expanders inside of it. Or you could do what I did and pull the external hard drives out of the enclosures, run a fan on them for cooling, ground them properly, take a power supply from a desktop and jump the black and green wire.

Or you could do hot swap bays and run cables back into a case if you use one.

If your servers are doing this for backup you may want to take a look at your DR plan and look at single point of failure (say power surge that destroys all equiptment hooked up to it).

Question 3

Would you be able to use this to run a RAID enclosure with two of the ports, and a LTO machine with one of the remaining?

Accepted Answer

This is not a RAID card, but a card that allows individual access to each drive/device. You can software RAID the two drives and connect to the LTO machine as long as it is using standard SATA or SAS.

Question 4

Would this work with a Backup Tape Drive?

Accepted Answer

The product, LSI LSI00276 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SATA / SAS 9201-16e Host Bus Adapter, supports SSP, SMP, STP, and SATA protocols, which are commonly used with various storage devices including Backup Tape Drives.

Question 5

How can I determine whether my system board is compatible with this card? I am running an HP XW9400 system board.

Accepted Answer

As long as you have a PCIEx8 connection it should work.

Question 6

Is this a new product or used/pull?

Accepted Answer

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us with your question. The item is brand new. Normally, if the item was refurbished or open box it would be listed on the product page.

Thank you, 
Newegg Support

Question 7

Hi, so this is just expander, i.e. it will allow me to connect 16 SATA drives like if I would connect them directly to motherboard? Would it support drivers over 2 TB? Thanks. V.

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it will allow the full speed to each of the drives, as long as you directly connect to the drives or use a backplane that does.
You can also look at SAS 9201-16i for cards with internal ports or a SAS 9201-8e or SAS 9201-4e if you don't need as many ports connected.

Questions & Answers