I bought a 15.36TB SSD SAMSUNG PM1633A SAS MZ-ILS15TA DELL EMC MZ1LS15THMLS-000D4

I am trying to figure out what to buy in order to connect it to my desktop PC via PCIE. Is this a viable or recommended solution?

SFF-8643 to SFF-8639 cable

Dell LSI 9311-8i 8-port Internal 12G SAS PCle x8 Host Bus RAID Adapter 3YDX4

  • @litchraleeEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    The first link is an SFF-8087 to 4x SFF-8482. While this cable could technically support SAS3 speeds, the SFF-8087 connector was specified for SAS2, not SAS3. As a result, you won’t really find any HBAs that have an SFF-8087 connector and do SAS3 over it. This cable is incompatible with the 9300-8i from your second link. I would choose something more like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GPD5KFK . Also be advised that if your SSD isn’t recognized with this cable, the reviews mention that the 3.3v power pin – if you have one at all – might need to be disabled, to avoid PWDIS issues.

    For the second link, that Inspur 9300-8i appears identical to the HBA I have, and it’s worked fine for me, although I only have SAS2 drives hooked up to it right now. The nice thing is that the listing advertises “IT mode”, which was important to me, because burning firmware to switch to IT mode is a sad experience.

    EDIT: BTW, when you receive this drive, you should probably dump the SMART data to see how much lifetime is left on this SSD. This is an enterprise SSD, so it’s possible that it came from several years of use as a caching drive in a server somewhere. That could do a number to its remaining lifetime, but I would imagine its performance would fit well for your use-case.