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July 11th, 2021 11:00

PowerEdge T420 "SATA_A" cable?

I picked up a Dell PowerEdge T420 off service for my home lab. It has served me well for the past few months as I have learned quite a bit from it. It is the model with 16x 2.5" hot swap bays and the Perc H710P. However, it seems to also have an addition of a 4x 3.5" hot swap bay in place of the 3x 5.25" optical drive bays. I have not attempted to use them until now. Since these are attached to the single SATA_A port on the motherboard, I assumed that these are for SATA drives. However, I seem to be having an issue getting any drive to work. The message I get during boot up is each of these drives have device errors with each of the BIOS SATA settings (IDE, AHCI, RAID). Off does not report any errors. Anyway, I took a closer look at the cable between the two and saw that it had a sticker on it with "CableCreation" on it and realized that it is a SFF-8087 to SATA cable. Since this is not a Dell cable, I am assuming that this, like the 4x 3.5" Hot Swap bays are later additions where the person trying to add them did not realize Dell tends to have special parts. So I started attempting to find the correct Dell cable for the SATA_A to 4 ports (BIOS refers to them as ports A-D) and I now find myself seeking help. I can't find any documentation on which cable to use, but I see two different cables on Amazon, Newegg, and eBay. Without a parts manual, I cannot tell if the VPFJC or the H3YKR is the correct cable. Does anyone out there have a clue?

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5.4K Posts

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July 11th, 2021 23:00

Hi, thanks for choosing Dell. I’m afraid I am not in any position to give you an answer. You will have to wait on community users who have actually tried the part from Amazon, Newegg, and eBay. Also I might want to add what you are attempting is not recommended. Wish you a great week ahead.

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