We have a 3U Supermicro chassis with 16 bays on a SAS expander backplane. We have 15 of the bays occupied with hard drives at the moment. We would like to add two more drives to the backplane, but we only have 1 bay open.
Does anyone know if there is a way to “add” more SAS ports to our backplane?
EDIT: More details!
We have this motherboard which comes with an onboard SAS HBA: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DT6-F.cfm
inside this chassis: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/836/SC836E16-R1200.cfm
I'm pretty sure this server uses the same chassis: http://www.pogolinux.com/quotes/editsys?sys_id=163850
If you go through the configuration page for that server, you can add 16 HDs + 2 SAS SSDs. That means they're filling up all of the bays and connecting 2 SAS drives internally. The chassis comes with brackets to hold the SSDs but I don't know where they would plug into the motherboard or the backplane. The motherboard SAS connectors are both plugged into the backplane.