The world is tough and uncaring sometimes, especially if you’re at home tinkering with HP Enterprise equipment. If you’re in the same boat as [Neel Chauhan], you might have found that HPE is less than interested in interacting with small individual customers. Thus, when a cable was needed, [Neel] was out of luck. The simple solution was to assemble a substitute one instead!
[Neel] had a HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen11 server, which was to be used as network-attached storage (NAS). Unfortunately, it was bought as an open box, and lacked an appropriate serial-attached SCSI (SAS) cable. Sadly, HPE support was of no assistance in sourcing one.
SlimSAS LP x8 to dual MiniSAS x4 cables aren’t easy to find from anyone else, it turns out. Thus, [Neel] turned to Amazon for help sourcing a combination of parts to make this work. A SlimSAS LP 8X to 2x MiniSAS SFF-8643 cable was used, along with a pair of Mini SAS SFF-8087 to SAS HD SFF-8643 female adapters. From there, SFF-8087 cables could be used to hook up to the actual SAS devices required. The total cost? $102.15.
The stack of cables and adapters looks a bit silly, but it works—and it got [Neel]’s NAS up and running. It’s frustrating when you have to go to such lengths, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen hackers have to recreate obscure cables or connectors from scratch! What’s the craziest adapter salad you’ve ever made?
I have made
– one Cat5-cable with one RJ-45 8P8C (with 4 wires) and two “RJ-11” 6P4C (with 2 wires) at each end
– A few cables meant for RJ485 with two male USB-A connectors (hey, it works, just don’t use it in a real USB socket!)
– Right now I have an IR reciever hooked to a Raspberry Pi via a PC tower’s 3.5mm audio jack socket(the “motherboard” end was an AC ’97 plug which I disassembled and put on the Pi’s headers), then in that audio jack is an old TRRS earbud cable that I soldered to an IC receiver that is still connected to the cirquit that I made 25 years ago for lirc, which I think has a D-sub-9 connector
It’s ugly. It will fall apart when I pick anything up. I need to fix it because I use it about 5 times per day, and once broken I won’t know how to put it back together anymore.
I’m intrigued!
Picture of Nr. 3 please :)
https://hackaday.com/2024/08/08/adapter-salad-making-your-own-server-cables-because-hp-wont-sell-them-to-you/
Woops, wrong link. https://mapstodon.space/@IIVQ/112930823611591125
I worked in a US Navy comms/EW facility for a while. The amount of legacy hardware and testing rigs in that place made it like a museum of functional hardware. Some of the WSC3 radios were Vietnam surplus. Name the obscure serial connector and I probably wired it to a USB, RJ45, or any of the two dozen types of circular mil-std connectors used by the military.
A few of those radios used 30 plus pin connectors but only needed 6 of the pins. Which meant many hours at the soldering bench continuity testing each pin and praying I didn’t use the wrong pin in the middle of the bundle. It wasn’t too bad with the hardware that was made in the 90’s since a lot of that gear was robust enough to be abused a little. The newer proprietary stuff though is all dipped sealed in layers of plasticized rubber with much smaller gauge wires. The PRC-117 J6 data cable was particularly annoying, I never could eliminate all the signal noise from those.
This is a necessity at times… RYO (roll your own) cable.
The cost for an original HPE cables does appear high for us little guys on tight budgets (when the CFO/partner having say on what’s for dinner), but a some digging and ingenuity does get one places…
I have seen this repeated [way-back] in Make magazine, Vol 1 (pg96) where one build a 5-way network cable set that can attach to Cisco products.
One needs to let the “CFO/partner” know about the ROI of RYO!
B^)
This one? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007208697433.html
30ish bucks on AliExpress. I frequently buy those RAID adapter to SATA or SAS cables there, they work quite well.
I was gonna say that sounded like something that can be found on AliExpress. It can be slightly daunting to search however.
Pretty sure it took me only a few seconds to find same or similar https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805454096904.html
Many projects are fun to create however it’s likely worth improving the article that alternates typically exist even if your chosen vendor is less than supportive. Tech built on standards is not usually too difficult to find alternates.
You can almost always get these off Ali express if you look for it.
Yeah the only reason you get parts like this off Amazon is if you need it real fast and don’t want to pay for fast shipping.
I think my Google-fu skills are pretty good, but I certainly don’t think I’m savant-like. Quite quickly, I found several sources for these, including eBay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/204736402698
That’s second-hand, been in-use part.
Along all possible problems, over time plastic becomes fragile.
Over like a century?
SAS cables aren’t meant to flex and move, they are meant to put there and leave there. I have a very old PC from mid-90s around and the IDE cables don’t look any less sturdy than when I bought them, used, 25+ years ago…
“Along all possible problems”, they either work or not. They are a cable, not a mechanical part. If the SAS cable looks clean, contacts are good, and they fit nicely, they will surely outlast the HDD, the power supply, and even the owner.
Cables can absolutely be marginal rather than just good/not-good; you can only munge the underlying analog behavior so far before the system’s attempt to maintain a nice, clean, digital channel on top of it either starts to involve enough expensive coping mechanisms(retransmit requests; dropping to lower link speeds) to be noticeable; or starts suffering uncorrectable or undetected errors; or just falls over and dies.
That said; unless you are doing pretty brutal things to them(or talking very long runs); connectors are typically of more concern than wires; so I’d almost certainly trust a single used cable over a daisy chain of assorted adapters.
Well, flexible polymers in general do have the tendency to age even when left in a box undisturbed.
reminds me of making my own 50 pins cuz he cables in the late ’80s with ribbon wire and punch down connectors.
Back before the Internet was big I had to turn a few 3ft 50pin SCSI cables into a 9 foot cable and use a vice to attach the remaining 50pin connectors to be able to connect 7 hard drives to a PC.
These days as a low volt tech I have to make all sorts of custom cables. UTP cable is used in alot of projects.
I do miss those days…
Chucking out all my old data cables and what not was a trauma and a half.
Shielded cat5 cable makes epic long VGA cables.
I went through a similar adventure, creating a GPU power cable for an HP DL380 Gen 8, since it has a different pin out than both the Gen 7 and standard ATX EPS12V (HP keeps moving 5v and 3v lines into pins where ground should be). The adapters are on eBay but HP sold 5 of them in a kit and the SKUs don’t clearly describe which specific end each cable is for, nor do sellers tell you which is which or the pin out.
I ended up crafting my own using a multimeter to verify the pin out and two EPS12V cables from a dead PSU I had lying around.
I had a project recently where I had to interface with a commercial telephone headset with a “Quick Disconnect” connector. It was a temporary thing, and I didn’t want to hack up headsets. Was able to make a connection with 4 jumper wires, tape, and cardboard, and made a suitable connection for the couple days I needed it.
Here’s an at this point partially unsuccessful project but also WIP… I tore out the guts of my guitar with the idea of connecting its pickups, potentiometers and switches to an external breadboard and try out different combinations the old fashioned way, with wires. But a big problem is that I need something like a 40-conductor cable to route everything from the inside of the guitar, through a hole in the pickguard to the breadboard that would be attached to the guitar body somewhere. Is there a cable type that I could use? Any communications cables with many leads (say, more than 10) seem too rigid for this, an IDE cable seems unwieldy, I’ve seen some automotive cables on Aliexpress but I’m nut sure they would be a better fit… So no solution in sight that is even close.
I’ve done the opposite.
When presented with proprietary sockets, replace those to use a standardized connector with a reasonably compliant standard cable.
Or, removing a dumb noncompliant jack and using the “correct” one.
Looking at you APC. Using an 8p8c jack for your regular USB 1.0 data connection is a dirty move. Replacing it with a standard USB B jack was one of the first times I used this particular hack.