Hello Shane   Yes, you have to have a controller connected to the backplane. If you purchased the system without a RAID controller then there should be a SAS cable that goes from the backplane to the S110 chipset controller slot on the system board. You can use the onboard S110 SATA controller for communication with the backplane. There are many limitations to the S110 controller, so it may not suit your needs. You will likely need to purchase the LSI 9207 if you want the drives to perform in a non-RAID environment. The other options are a PERC H710; which you could set the drives in single drive RAID 0s. In that state they operate like non-RAID drives. You could also get an H310. The H310 supports non-RAID mode, but we added some functionality to the H310 that are not present in previous versions of the card. In doing so it has reduced performance when operating in non-RAID mode. The reason I say you will likely want a different controller than the S110 is because you mentioned you have SAS drives. The S110 is a SATA only controller. Also, the S110 only supports up to 4 drives. To access the RAID BIOS make sure the S110 is enabled in the system BIOS. In the BIOS go to SATA settings. In the drop down set the mode to RAID. This will turn on the S110 controller. Then you can configure the drives in the S110 BIOS during boot with CTL R. I'm not sure what operating system you are installing, but the S110 is only compatible with Windows. Thanks
I have an r720 with no raid card.  When I plug an ssd or 15k/10k sas drive into the hotswap backplane, the chassis recognizes that the drive is plugged in (I get an orange light and lcd alert that the drive is removed when I take it out).  However, the bios and OS don't seem to recognize any of the hotswap drives (they only see the optical drive attached to the sata ports on the motherboard. Do I need a controller card to use drives plugged into the backplane, or is there a way to use the backplane without a controller card?  I do not need raid functionality.  Thanks in advance. -shane
r720 can i connect sas/sata hdd without a controller card?