I purchased two additional SAS drives for my Dell R710 without realizing that the SAS backplane only supports 4 drives. The face plate of the server supports six 3.5 "drives, 4 of which are 2.5" drives in 3.5" drive caddys.
How do I go about replacing the drive baseboard which will allow me to use these two additional drives?
EDIT: How do I go about getting the right part number for a 6x SAS backplane to replace the 4x backplane?
EDIT: Reference pasted picture from R710 owners manual.
Best Answer
What do you mean with 'drive baseboard' ?
If you are concerned about your RAID card having only four SAS/SATA links, please consider that either the RAID card provide multilane SAS (1 connector carries 2/4 SAS links) or the server disk backplane integrate a SAS expander to provide more (in your case, six) downstream ports.
In other words, you should have no problem installing your new drives.
UPDATE: ok, so you have a backplane limited to only 4 SAS units. You need to replace your backplane with something similar to that, but to be really sure you should contact DELL support. Fortunately, the W814D (6x SAS) seems quite cheap on Ebay so you can always try and see what happens.
Regarding the drive question (rightfully) raised by @gh0st: with a PERC H200/H700, equipped with modern (release date > 2013) firmware release, you can use whatever drive you want (both SAS and SATA).