backplane from scsi sas to sata

[LeonardRougeau]

Hello, I have a MT-M 8863 3U IBM server and would like to upgrade my backplane from scsi sas to sata. I notice that the pins on a sata and scsi sas drive are the same except for the sas portion which have four pin power connections attached to the opposite side of where the scsi pins are. I have posted a pic of my hot swap drive pins and packplane.
I was thinking about installing sata hard drives and route the power from the power connector directly to the hard drives. I know this may not be able to perform a hard drive hot swap. I just hope there is an upgrade or work around.

 

[rclarke250]

No need, all SAS backplanes are backwards compatible with SATA drives, All SATA drives are Hot swap at the hardware level, that is the reason some of the pins are shorter on the drive, this would still need to be supported by the controller, and enabled. But more to the point, just put a SATA drive in, it should be read just fine by the SAS backplane and SAS HBC. Also, going from SAS to Sata backplane would be a downgrade as you would loose functionality, and gain nothing. Check out this link for more info. Link

 

[LeonardRougeau]

Thanks for the info, it will be much cheaper to install sata without having to change the backplane or buy 10k scsi hard drives. I'm new to server builds, but I'm sure I will be ok, I have no problems building desktops and can pretty much do it with my eyes closed. Again Thanks and I want to share something I found on the internet a few days ago that you may already know about and my want to comment on. Do you know anything about the PFsense DYI routers. I was thinking about building a firewall. If you feel it is not appropriate to discuss this topic in this thread you can start a new thread. I sure most tech heads would accept the challenge of trying to build a router or firewall.