sas HP disk connection and host PC card

[Cyberwebspace]

I have 4 HP 2tb 7200rom SAS drives

I want to put them in a USB connected enclosure except it requires the drives to be formatted

I need a cheap solution for a desktop or laptop connection to the drives to format them

any ideas, all I have at the moment is an LSI LOGIC PCI card thats labeled with "SA3080x-hp" but I can find no cables to connect it to the disk.

[BeemerBiker]

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@Cyberwebspace wrote:

I have 4 HP 2tb 7200rom SAS drives

I want to put them in a USB connected enclosure except it requires the drives to be formatted

I need a cheap solution for a desktop or laptop connection to the drives to format them

any ideas, all I have at the moment is an LSI LOGIC PCI card thats labeled with "SA3080x-hp" but I can find no cables to connect it to the disk.

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Formatting is carried out by the USB controller.  The controller has to have an SAS chipset to format an SAS drive.  What USB-SAS enclosure are you using?  

You can obtain cables for that PCI-X adapter.  Many PCI-X adapter will work in a standard PCI slot but run at 1/2 or lower  speed.  Just make sure the pins that go past the end of the socket do not touch any metal parts.  I do not know if this will work on your SAS controller but I have seen a lot of PCI-X work in smaller sockets.

If you use an adapter like this then the motherboard needs to have an SAS controller chip.  Most HP servers and some desktop support SAS.  I do not know of any laptop that does SAS with a simple adapter.

You might consider a 4 bay Synology or similar NAS that supports SAS.