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I bought a Broadcom 9400-16e HBA that has four external ports. I was hoping that by using four mini-SAS cables that fan-out to two, I could double the number of connected drives from 16 to 32. However, each fan-out cable can only detect four drives, two per mini-sas instead of four.

I seem to have misunderstood their capability. I understood the throughput would be half for each mini-SAS, but didn't expect they'd only address half the number of drives each.

Is there a storcli command I can run so that each port at the HBA can address 8 drives using the fan-out cables? Or do I need to buy some expanders?

Thanks

Jorsher
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    Is there a reason you are not trying to use SAS as intended, with a backplane? – TomTom Jan 24 '23 at 04:27
  • What the question is calling for is certainly not a *reasonable business practice*. – Nikita Kipriyanov Jan 24 '23 at 06:28
  • Thanks for the response. This is for home use. I have a couple 24-drive ZFS pools. Because I'm unable to have a 4u chassis shipped here, I've been connecting 8-bay NAS enclosures via SAS cables. The enclosures have a "backplane" that is just SAS connectors for the drives, and SATA connectors on the other side. Have been using mini-SAS to SATA breakout cables. Anyway, ended up buying an expander for each enclosure. – Jorsher Jan 25 '23 at 22:17

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This is a server with 4 external mini-SAS ports, going to separate JBOD enclosures. I've bought a SAS expander for each JBOD.

Jorsher
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