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April 26th, 2025 13:44
Dell PowerEdge R930 Backplane Problems
Hi,
i got myself a Dell PowerEdge R930, it had the 24x SAS Backplane, but i wanted to use NVME Drives in the front.
I already have a R730xd with 4x PCI-E SSDs in front, but the R930 can take 8 NVME drives, so i got myself a fitting Backplane for the R930.
Dell part number 0JXR3K.
And of course, a second PCI-E extender card.
I put the Adapter Cards in slots 4 and 7, they get detected by the server.
Cabled everything according to the picture in the Manual:
Problem is: The server complains that ports A, C, D (recognized by the Server as A0,A1,B1) are cabled incorrectly. The "B" ports, recognized by the server as "B0" seem to work .. but the attached PCI-E-SSDs don´t get recognized.
I tried booting the server without the cables and the server correctly recognizes that the cables are not attached at all and says "not connected".
I can´t wrap my head around that, i can only imagine the backplane being faulty.
I tried every combination of connecting the cables, it complains every time, that the cabling of A,C,D is wrong.
The SAS Ports on the backplane work fine, disks are getting recognized no problem.
The Cables work totally fine in the R730xd, also i tested both of the PCI-E extender cards, they both work fine.
The SSDs (Intel P4800) also work fine in the R730xd.
Is there anything im missing or did i get a faulty backplane from the ebay seller? Its supposed to be "new and unused". I couldn´t see signs of use on it.
Im really out of ideas at this point.
Any suggestions?
g3n3r1cl10n
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April 29th, 2025 14:14
Hi,
thanks for your reply.
I got the server to work, it was the cables. As the original cables for the R930 are hard to come by, I used third party cables, the same ones that worked totally fine in my R730xd.
After received one of the original cables for the R930 today, part number 09RK88 and it works great, the server only complains about backplane 1 where the third party cables are, backplane 2 which now uses the original cable works perfect, no errors and the disks get recognized correctly.
I don´t get why the cables work totally fine for connecting the nvme-backplane in my R730xd but not for the backplane in the R930.
Glad it works now, maybe this topic is still useful for other people who try to reconfigure their R930 for NVME.
The cables are sadly hard to come by and are expensive, the second cable (066FK9) is still on the way from the USA to here in germany.
The third party cables from 10GTek (CAB-8643/8643-P0.8M) are working fine in my R630 and R730xd... but it seems, the R930 is special in many ways... even on the topic of cables.
Still love the machine, its such a powerhouse!
Thanks again for replying, but i guess we can mark the problem as solved.
DELL-Young E
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April 27th, 2025 23:48
Hello, could you give us the cable part number by replying to this thread?
Also by DM, could you please send your system's service tag?
https://www.dell.com/community/en/direct-messaging
Respectfully,