In building a new NAS recently, I needed to attach a lot of drives from an SFF-8087 backplane cheaply. After a quick look around I found the Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8i – a card with a common and proven chipset – going particularly cheaply (~AU$100). At 8 ports per card I could load out the 24 ports required using three cards, at a fraction of the price for one or two of the big 24-/16-port cards. Great.

The only issue is that these cards are Universal I/O (UIO), which means the components and brackets are mounted on the opposite side of the PCB to standard cards.  That makes ‘Universal I/O’ a total misnomer in my book, since it poses two potential problems for a non-UIO chassis: the heatsinks/capacitors/etc can interfere with cards in adjacent slots that have their components mounted on the standard side (not a problem in this case, since the system they’re destined for has onboard video); and with the bracket being mounted on the opposite side, the card will not fit in a standard case.

Hunting through a box of screws I came out with a bunch ~10mm motherboard standoffs that are just the right length to mount the bracket on the standard side of the card.  There are a couple of other hurdles, but here’s how I did it:

1. Remove the bracket (simply remove the screws)
2. Screw motherboard standoffs directly into the now vacant holes in the PCB
   

   Be careful screwing in the motherboard standoff - keeping it at 90' is difficult

3. The threading on your motherboard standoff probably doesn’t match the threading on the bracket, so you may need to quickly file out the bracket thread
   

   Keep filing until the hole is big enough to accomodate the new screw (~1mm)

4. Attach the bracket to the standoffs with screws
   

   You're good to go!

5. Mount in case as normal

The whole process should take you no longer than about 5 minutes.  Enjoy!