Question 1

I have a saberthooth 990 r2 mb I want to go raid with 4 1 tb hd can I use these or am I missing something else?

Accepted Answer

These cables are really only used with the Norco cases like the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219033 This case has 5 mini sas plugs in it to attach to the hard drives. If you want to hook this case up to your motherboard and do not have a minisas plug on said motherboard, you will need these reverse breakout cables so you can plug the sata plugs into your motherboard, and the minisas cable into one of the 5 rows in the case. If this is what you want to do, and you have one of these types of Norco cases, this will work perfectly. Raid whatever will work fine as long as you get the drives talking to the motherboard.

Question 2

I bought one of these a while back from you guys, and have not been able to figure out how to get this to work with my Supermicro x8 4u system. I am using an LSI SAS 9212-4i, and the controller will not recognize any of the drives when using this cable. Do you have any suggestions?

Accepted Answer

I googled your card, and I think you've bought the wrong cable for what you're trying to do.  This is the REVERSE breakout cable, so it will take 4 SATA ports on your motherboard, and bundle them into a single plug, that you can then use to plug into a backplane (ideally a backplane that has support for 4 drives on it  eg: NORCO RPC-4220 4U).

What I think you need is a regular breakout cable, I just searched for "breakout cable" on newegg and in the description most day they plug into the port on your controller card and then into 4 drives.  Again, this cable is meant to use 4 SATA ports, and then plug into some sort of HDD backplane to drive 4 drives.

Questions & Answers