A:

This is according to the manufacturer technical support: The cable in question uses side band for backplanes that support the SGPIO standard. SGPIO is an acronym for Serial General Purpose Input/Output which is a 4-signal (or 4-wire) bus used between a host bus adapter (HBA) and a backplane; of the 4 signals, 3 are driven by the HBA and 1 by the backplane. Please refer to the specification for SGPIO for more information. Our SAS controllers support two communications standards for use with different SAS backplanes: SGPIO and I2C.