So I am switching from a Synology with 8 drive bays to a server with 24 drive bays to up my data hoarding game. This is the chassis I will be using. There appear to be 6 backplanes, each of which drive 4 drives. What I am unsure of is how to connect that to my system. I understand I should probably be using an HBA card, I see a lot of recommendations for the LSI 9211-8i, but I only see 2 ports on that, is that sufficient? If not which hba card should I be going for? Also which cables will I need to connect it to the backplanes? Oh also I am using the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX, Intel Z790 Motherboard if that matters for this question. Thanks in advance!
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Your links says:
Six internal SFF-8643 HD Mini SAS connectors support up to twenty-four 6Gb/s 3.5" or 2.5" SATA (II or III) or SAS 6 or 12Gb/s hard drives
Each SAS ports supports 4 drives. The “8i” card is named that because it has 2 SAS ports to support 8 internal drives. Most people use breakout cables that are SFF-8087 (internal SAS port) to 4X SATA but you’ve got a backplane so you don’t want that.
You can either buy an expensive LSI SAS 24i card like this which has 6 SAS ports (6 ports x 4 drives = 24 drives)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/133151982832
Or get the 8i card together with a SAS expander card like this
https://www.ebay.com/itm/305142758393
The SAS expander card doesn’t work by itself. You connect 1 or 2 ports to the main SAS HBA card. Then you can connect the other SAS ports to your backplane. It also only needs power from the PCIE slot, the data is all sent over the SAS cables back to the HBA card.
You would need some SFF-8087 to 8087 cables to connect the HBA card to the expander card and then some 8087 to 8643 cables to connect to the backplane.
https://www.amazon.com/10Gtek-Internal-SFF-8643-SFF-8087-0-8-Meter/dp/B01AOS4RFQ
Amazing, thank you so much for such a detailed answer, that really clears things up. I’ve ordered myself and sas expander card to go with the LSI 9211-8i along with the cables.