I was looking to upgrade my storage and was recommended to go with used SAS drives and an LSI SAS controller. I purchased an LSI 9211-8i HBA, 8TB Seagate Exos drives, and these cables. The drives are not spinning up at all when connected to the power supply. Are these cables not the right choice for this?

Edit: I have confirmed that a regular SATA drive works if connected with an SFF-8087 to Sata cable. Either I’ve somehow received 10 dead drives or I’m not powering them right.

Edit 2: I’m guessing its related to this: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/84038-so-your-new-sas-or-sata-drive-wont-start-spin-up/

What an irritating issue.

So my options seem to be:

  • Tape mod the SATA power adapter or drives to prevent pin 3 from disabling the drive - cheap but tedious
  • Use a molex adapter to power the drives - less cheap, I’d need new PSU and SAS cables
  • Upgrade my PSU to one that supports SATA 3.3 - I’ll probably do this. I just bought a new PSU for the purpose of powering these drives, so I can still return it.
  • @[email protected]English
    0•5 days ago

    I see two potential issues here, one of which I addressed in an older comment elsewhere.

    The first is whether that breakout cable is a forward breakout cable, which is what you need when one controller is being split out to multiple HDDs. If it’s a backwards breakout cable, then there is no possibility that it will work for your configuration. The description on that Amazon page doesn’t explicitly say which way it is, also it does mention using the cable for one controller to four drives. So maybe this is indeed a forward breakout cable.

    The second potential issue is whether the Power Disable (PWDIS) feature is causing the drives to stay powered down. Although looking at that cable you have, I can’t see where 3.3v would be coming from, unless you’re attaching a SATA power connector that actually provides 3.3v, or if the cable itself is producing 3.3v by an internal buck converter from the 12v or 5v rails.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•4 days ago

      It seems most likely that the PWDIS issue is at fault here. I’ll need to try a tape mod to confirm.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•5 days ago

      I am attaching a SATA power cable to the connector, I believe it should be able to provide that power. The same SATA power connector is capable of powering other drives. I’ll look into that feature.