I have a HBA 330 IT controller which has 2x4 12 Gbit/s SAS (or 6 Gbit/s SATA) ports, available through two SFF-8643 mini-SAS connectors. Though it has only 8 ports, it can aparently support up to 32 drives. I wonder, how would I connect more than 8 drives?
I use it together with WD Red 8TB (cmr) drives for a FreeNas RAID-Z2.
Currently I have 4 of these SATA drives attached at one of the two mini-SAS connectors.
now I would like o add 8 more drives (for a total of 12 drives).
I have an 8-drive enclosure that has two backplanes, each of which can be attached through one SFF-8087 connector.
So, here are my questions:
how do I split from one 4-port SFF-8643 connector (on the conroller side) to two 4-port SFF-8087 connectors (one for each backplane)?
since the SAS connectors provide 12 Gbit/s per port and my SATA drives only use 6 Gbit/s per port, can I expect for these 8 SATA drives sitting on one SFF-8643 connector to perform equally well as the other 4 drives sitting on the oher SFF-8643 connector?
is it okay to place all 12 drives into the same RAID-Z2 array, even though 4 of them are directly connected to one of the (4-port) connectors, while the other 8 are connected through some sort of splitter to the other (4-port) connector?
is this kosher?
