The MiniSAS SFF-8088 ports combine four hard drives connections

 The MiniSAS SFF-8088 ports combine four hard drives connections into one, and reduce possible points of failures, while preserving uninterrupted data transfer. The ES104X+ also supports SATA drives, allowing users to have the option to choose between high performance and high capacity storage solutions. Hard drive and RAID controller bundle options are available. When utilizing a SAS or SATA RAID controller, the unit could effortlessly support multi-streaming of compressed high-quality playback or a single-stream of uncompressed 10-bit high definition video under various RAID modes.MiniSAS SFF-8088  CABLE, 3M is a computer bus used to move data to and from computer storage devices such as hard drives and tape drives. SAS depends on a point-to-point serial protocol that replaces the parallel SCSI bus technology that first appeared in the mid 1980s in data centers and workstations, and it uses the standard SCSI command set. The T10 technical committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) develops and maintains the SAS protocol; the SCSI Trade Association (SCSITA) promotes the technology.


"This durable SAS cable features an MiniSAS SFF-8088 (external mini-SAS) connector, and supports data transfer rates of up to 6 Gbps." SAS9200-8E 8PORT Ext 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0 comments Thorndike, FiberStore product manager. "Unlike SFF-8087, where the top cards often have four or six connectors, SFF-8088 usually comes with only one or two connectors per controller. This is because a single SFF-8088 connector on a SAS Expander-enabled controller can connect to a large SAS Expander-enable enclosure, which can then be daisy-chained."