CableDeconn SFF-8643 Internal Mini SAS HD to (4) 29pin SFF-8482 connectors with SAS 15pin Power Port 12GB/S Cable (1M) (H0204)

Actually works with SAS drives

Used to connect some SAS drives to an LSI 9400 HBA. Works great. Cables are more than long enough to work in any PC case.

These worked as described. My only complaint is that when you combine them with the power connecter they stick out kind too far. My drive cage faces the left side for drive insertion and so these are on the back facing the right panel. The air gap there is barely enough, except near the bottom drive slot. That one is near where the side panel attaches and it's not possible to use this connector there. It would be much better if they had a right angle connector for the sas wiring and the power attachment.

I bought the 4TB Seagate 12Gb/sec drive here and received last Wednesday.I didn't really know SAS, but I've worked as a systems engineer in Unix, enterprise backup, etc. so I was familiar with the "pro" vs. consumer dichotomy. I have a 6 year old Lenovo Thinkstation P300 Xeon box which I love. It's my home/work pc. I run a Broadcom-LSI Megaraid 9361-8i SAS-Sata raid storage card and a RAID-5 production volume with 3 Seagate SATA III drives. The card is specced for 12Gb/sec SAS, and I wanted to hook my backup volume to it and try things. The only caveat is as another has mentioned, when you plug in the power supply drive power connectors into the SAS-end of this cable, it makes a really tall/high-profile total connector, and I ran into obstructions with the case side panel. Since my raid drives are SATA III, I just swapped back the old SFF-8643 to SATA cables for those 2 side-oriented drives. Then I plug this new cable into the card's other mini SAS/SATA SFF-8643 interface, and the 3rd SATA drive in the RAID set I have connected with this new cable. It all works. I have a new Lenovo drive caddy coming so I can mount the 4TB SAS and swap into the PC for the current DVD ROM when I want to do backups. I kind of wish I bought an SED (self-encrypting disk) capable version, and I could then try Broadcom's safe store license for the controller card. But, eh. I try to do a backup a month with full image, and I use Windows built in ("sdclt" command at run box). What's funny in researching all this as a first-time SAS user, I see people bandying about "oh you need a SAS BACKPLANE". Backplane. That's funny. I haven't seen that since the 90s practically when I worked for EMC. Backplanes existed mostly in large storage arrays connected to a SAN. And the FRONTPLANE were internal channel directors cabled fibre channel to the san switch or open host production computers. What's ridiculous is the concept of BACKPLANE/FRONTPLANE, I've never seen anywhere in pcs or workstations. And yet somebody new is supposed to listen to the "experts" here and go chasing it. No, simply, you need to get a SAS-capable, PCI-E, storage controller card. "BACKPLANE!"

I purchased a High Point RocketRAID 3720A RAID controller ($259), hooked up 4 x 6TB 12GB SAS drives ($125/ea.) and I used these cables to connect from my SFF-8643 to the drives. After configuring a 4-drive RAID-5 array, I ran a Crystal DiskMark scan; it showed a read speed of 637MB/sec and with an incredible write speed of 633MB/sec. I was worried about the speed because other folks reviewed these cables and stated they only support a transfer rate of 6GB/sec cables, not the 12GB/sec the drives and controller are capable of; however, with the reported Crystal DiskMark speeds, I think the other reviewers may have either connected 6GB/sec SAS drives or used SATA drives: those drives are limited to a 6GB/sec transfer rate, and no cable or controller is going to get better speeds.PERFORMANCEI read online that while RAID-5 has a very good read speed, a write speed of 105MB/sec was respectable, so I decided to try a real-world write test. I'm currently copying 11TB of my Plex movie files to my new array; the copy speed is hovering at 600MB/sec and Windows anticipates the copy will complete in less than 6 hours.SUMMARYI purchased two sets of cables because eventually I will have an 8-drive RAID-5 array and these cables are just what I needed. GREAT JOB!

This cable worked perfectly with the LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i SATA/SAS Host Bus Adapter. I especially like the cable design feature that avoids the use of clunky molex cables to power the drives - its got the data port on one side, and the power port on the other. You don't need special power cables for your drives; your 15 pin power cables used with SATA drives will work fine with SAS drives.Cable length was more than long enough to accommodate my ATX full size case. With the HBA and two of these cables, you can plug up to 8 drives and free up a ton of motherboard SATA ports. This cleaned up the cabling a lot on the front side of the motherboard for me, and you still have your SATA ports if needed.07-13-2020 Update:I forgot to mention that it's important to check hard disk compatibility with your SAS adapters. I chose Seagate ST8000NM0065 SAS 12 Gbps drives because they're on the compatibility list for the LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i Host Bus Adapter. My Seagate ST8000NM0055 SATA drives are also compatible with the LSI adapter and the CableDeconn cable..It's also important to realize that you're not going to get anywhere near 12Gbps throughput, or roughly 1.5 gigabytes per second in a JBOD SAS drive setup. My JBOD setup tops out around 240 megabytes per second sustained write speed on very large files for the ST8000NM0065s with write caching enabled. That's about 1.9 Gbps.

SAS and SATA differences are not well understood by many. This cable allowed me to connect true SAS devices like an HP LTO tape drive and Seagate SAS Enterprise hard drive using a Dell SAS host adapter. Other similar cables had professed SAS compatibility, but only worked on SATA devices.

This product works perfectly fine with 12G LSI cards. I read a lot of comments how these cables down work. If it does not you may want to validate it by doing the 3.3v mod on your pulled enterprise SAS drive.