I recently bought a set of 6 cables to connect my LSI MegaRAID card to my Norco-4224 backplane. The connector on both ends is SFF-8087.
However, when they arrived, the disks would not be detected. I thought the cable was faulty, but I tried all 6 and none work. So I borrowed an SFF-8087 cable from my Highpoint Tech RAID card and the disk was detected.
I tried poking a multimeter in, but they seemed to be wired correctly. Although the connectors are very fiddly so I can't guarantee my results.
The connectors between them appear to be different slightly. The Highpoint Tech cables have thick copper on the connectors PCB with varying lengths, whereas the ones purchased with the LSI have thin copper with a horizontal groove.
The ones I purchased look like this:
Whereas the Highpoint Tech ones look like this:
This has left me very puzzled! And with lots of questions like:
- Is this enough to cause a connection fault?
- Are the cables themselves faulty or just the connectors?
- Do certain cards/backplanes need certain connector types?
- Are the different copper lengths to ensure they can be hotplugged?
- How does one better describe these differences?
- How does one go about testing these cables?