Can someone explain how the drives / backplane in the HL8 connect to the motherboard (B550I AORUS PRO AX 1.0). The mobo specs only list that is has (4) SATA ports; with that being said, I would assuming some time of HBA or built in mini SAS connector on the mobo, but I don’t see that mentioned anywhere.
1 Like
Four of the connections go to the motherboard and the other four go to an m.2 SATA adapter card like this;
I forget which specific adapter they use, it may be discussed here on one of the forum threads from launch, but since a specific one isn’t listed on the specs they probably have the option to substitute if needed. IIRC, one issue was that some of the adapters do not support hot swap, and so they chose one that supported hot swap.
What that does mean is that with 8 drives connected, you lose use of one of the two m.2 slots on the motherboard for other uses.
3 Likes
i emailed customer support about this; their response below for reference:
“Yes, the motherboard has slots. We use SilverStone Technology ECS07 5-Port SATA Gen3 6Gbps Non-RAID M.2 PCIe Storage Expansion Card to connect the remaining ATA connectors from the backplane. This helps us to keep the PCIe slot unused.”
1 Like
That’s the one, yes.