I got a used Supermicro server with no drives in it. When I plug in a SATA drive it detects it just fine but when I plug in a SAS drive, even the BIOS will not detect the drive. It looks like the backplane has SAS connectors on it, but I'm not sure if the motherboard supports it, or if there is some sort of configuration needed to enable it. I've reset the CMOS to see if that helped but it did not.
Here is the output of dmidecode
on the machine
https://gist.github.com/MassTroy/126eb1cb78858ca495301a300e6c79f4
BIOS Information
Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
Version: 2.1a
Release Date: 12/30/2011
Base Board Information
Manufacturer: Supermicro
Product Name: X8DTL
Serial Number: VM2AS37615
Looking up that model number I find 6 different sub models but none of them just say X8DTL