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Okay so I am buying some used hardware on ebay and found a few poweredge servers for a good price. These servers come with a PERC 6i card and 4x 146gb internal SAS drives.

I want to purchase a 8 Bay Hard drive enclosure that has 2 SFF-8470 ports.

My question is, what is the best way to hook up the PERC6i to this enclosure, and how long can my cables be if I am using SATA drives in the enclosure.

Please Advise.

Chris Kooken
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1 Answers1

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The PERC 6i controller doesn't have external ports. You would have to add another controller card with external ports unless you do something exotic.

murisonc
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  • Could i not use something like this to give it external ports? http://compare.ebay.com/like/230397975423?var=lv&ltyp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar&_lwgsi=y – Chris Kooken Aug 03 '11 at 23:37
  • You'll have to look at the connectors on the PERC 6i card. It might work and it might not but you'll lose the use of some or all of the internal hard drives. This is what I would call exotic but it's not out of the question to attempt something like this. Not sure if it would work though. – murisonc Aug 03 '11 at 23:55
  • So i guess my question is: SATA has a maximum cable length of 1M, where SAS has 10M. If this is a SAS connector going to a backplane that has SATA drives, can i use a longer cable? – Chris Kooken Aug 04 '11 at 00:17
  • Nope. When connecting SATA drives to a SAS controller the controller will operate at the lower SATA voltages. – murisonc Aug 04 '11 at 00:26