I'm interested in building a box with the In-Win IW-RS316. It supports a total of 16 hot-swappable drives, with up to 8 of them being NVMe.
Looking at the backplane, it looks like it has 2 mini-SAS connectors to support the 8 bays in the middle.
The 8 "hybrid" bays on the outside each use an 8611 OCUlink connector. That makes sense for using NVMe drives, but how do you support SATA drives with that?
The closest cable I could find that would do that would be an OCUlink to 8643, but that would require a total of 8 - 8643 connectors on your motherboard/HBA card(s) to use all of the those bays.
Is there such thing as a 8611 to 8643/8087 reverse fanout cable that splits one 8643 into 4 - 8611 connectors to support SATA/SAS drives?
SOLVED:
Reached out to In-Win (and read the manual). The SAS expander on the backplane gives access to 16 SAS/SATA drives as long as an OCUlink/slimSAS cable isn't connected to that drive. Connecting an OCUlink/slimSAS to one of the NVMe-compatible bays means that it can only be used with NVMe (until the OCUlink/slimSAS cable is disconnected from that bay).
From In-Win (who got back to me < 6 hours after I reached out via their website).
Looking at the backplane, it looks like it has 2 mini-SAS connectors to support the 8 bays in the middle.
The 8 "hybrid" bays on the outside each use an 8611 OCUlink connector. That makes sense for using NVMe drives, but how do you support SATA drives with that?
The closest cable I could find that would do that would be an OCUlink to 8643, but that would require a total of 8 - 8643 connectors on your motherboard/HBA card(s) to use all of the those bays.
Is there such thing as a 8611 to 8643/8087 reverse fanout cable that splits one 8643 into 4 - 8611 connectors to support SATA/SAS drives?
SOLVED:
Reached out to In-Win (and read the manual). The SAS expander on the backplane gives access to 16 SAS/SATA drives as long as an OCUlink/slimSAS cable isn't connected to that drive. Connecting an OCUlink/slimSAS to one of the NVMe-compatible bays means that it can only be used with NVMe (until the OCUlink/slimSAS cable is disconnected from that bay).
From In-Win (who got back to me < 6 hours after I reached out via their website).
Thank you for reaching out to us regarding our RS316-07 model. This model has an integrated SAS Expander chip on the backplane. It is not a direct connect backplane where each Mini-SAS cable controlling up to 4x drives. The SAS Expander chip provides control and access to all 16 drives. All that is needed is a Host Bus Adapter or Host RAID Adapter to connect to the backplane via the first two SFF-8643 connectors. When the Host Adapter is connected to the backplane, are you able to view the SATA drives within the Host Adapter’s GUI?
In regards to the OcuLink connectors, if an OcuLink cable is attached to the backplane, each cable connected OcuLink port will reside outside of the control of the SAS Expander as the NVMe controller will provide a direct connection to the OcuLink port causing the SAS Expander to disregard each occupied NVMe drive. However, the SAS Expander will still be able to control all other non-OcuLink connected drive bays. For example, if SATA drives are installed instead of U.2 NVMe drives.
Unfortunately, after reviewing our documentation under the “Download” tab on our product link: https://www.ipc.in-win.com/rackmount-chassis-iw-rs316-07 I noticed that our descriptions are not very clear and may cause confusion.
Will you be able to connect an HBA or RAID HBA to one or both 12G (SFF-8643) ports to see if the HBA is able to view all the installed SATA drives? A screenshot of the HBA GUI will be helpful. In addition, the SAS Expander backplane shipped to you also has an integrated DIP Switch which is used for different Host Bus Controllers. It should already be defaulted for use with LSI/Broadcom controllers. Once you have things connected, we can try to work with you to get things running.
Last edited: