After having purchased a Dell T420 with SATA drives and without RAID, and discovering this was a mistake for performance reasons, I'm obtaining a Perc H710 PCI card and SAS drives. Now I'm stuck with a dumb question: what kind of cables are needed to go between the Perc H710 card and the SAS drives? I confess to being inexperienced with SAS and RAID cards, and I can't quite figure out the correct power and data cabling, despite having spent some time looking at descriptions and pictures on the web. (Also, I'm not currently next to the computer, making it more difficult to figure out the right parts that I need.)
The T420 was purchased with the cabled 4-drive, 3.5" configuration with embedded SATA. If someone could point me towards a description of the typical connectors needed by SAS drives, and what a Dell T420 might have or need to put SAS drives in it, I would very much appreciate it.
This looks like the part you're looking for:
XP00F - ASSY,CBL,MB,HD,SAS A,R420/R320 - Mini SAS & ODD power cable, MB (SAS A) to HDD (used with cable HDD).
This is the SAS version of the cable, where p/n H3YKR looks to be the SATA version - though I'd expect the SAS cable would probably work fine for either anyway since the SAS connectors are compatible with SATA drives, and the controller likely can't "see" the difference in what type of cable is being used.
I'd suggest going for a model w/ a backplane next time around - that gets you hot-swapping, and compatibility with both SATA and SAS (even mixed if you so desire).