Photo 1: Returned SAS Cables
Recently we had a customer request to return a large quantity of SAS cables they had purchased from Pactech. They reported these cables were defective. Pause for a second and observe the photo above and two photos below of the returned cables. What can you conclude?
Photo 2: Returned SAS Cables
Photo 3: Returned SAS Cables
Here are our conclusions:
- The length of each of these cables was too long to connect between the controller and drive within the server. The customer ended up making several kinks and tying them up. These sharp bends ruined the wires inside
- These cables were bundled together and installed within a 1U server. This bundle was bent so tightly within a very constrained space that broke the solder connections within the SAS connectors.
To avoid these issues in your server designs, you will cables that fit perfectly for your setup. We have come up with two custom cable configurators, in addition to the SATA Cable Configurator we shared in our last blog post, to ensure you get the right drive cable design:
Going back to the customer story, we told them they would need proper angle connectors and measure accurate cable lengths for their design. We gave them our SAS cable configurator to organize their specifications.