SAS & Sata Question

[FN-GM]

Hi,

 

Quick daft question here.....

 

On a Dell Poweredge 2900, the server has SAS Drives. To upgrade storage can you use SATA dirves?

 

Thanks

[mac_shinobi]

you cant mix sas and sata drives - you could possibly get a SATA PCI Card or PCI Express SATA card and attach the sata drives there but from what I am aware dont think you can mix them

[PeterW]

Yes that should be no problem, SATA+SAS drives can be used on SAS controllers but only SATA drives can be used on SATA controllers.

[mac_shinobi]

Turns out that powdarmonkey is correct as per the wiki link

 

Serial Attached SCSI - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

due to signalling voltages etc and how it works you would need individual controllers because of how they work etc

[DMcCoy]

sas controllers should be compatible with SATA drives (it's part of the sas standard). Although you may find that a controller won't mix types on the same port or card. The other thing to check is what sas connectors the Dell is using.

 

I'm using an HP E200 SAS RAID card with a SAS to 4 SATA connector cable at the moment. You may find that it has only 2 connector ports for 8 drives and needs a different cable.

[john]

I have a HP Proliant that I got a couple of months ago and have mixed SAS and SATA Drives in that, and its got a HP SAS RAID card in (forgot the model off the top of my head its a good one though with BBWC and lots of ram). I've got mirrored SAS Drives for the OS and stuff that needs the 15K performance of the SAS and then got a large amount of bulk storage on SATA Drives (so things like App installers, archive files, low level access stuff etc will live on them as they were by far cheaper than the SAS ones).

[User3204]

SATA isn't as good as SAS.

It may be marginally cheaper, and have bigger capacities, but it also has a lower MTBF (mean time between failures) so it's more likely to break.

 

... I suppose it depends on what you want to use it for...

[FN-GM]

Its only going to be storing old user files and a few other bits and bats. A mixed result there i will try and see how we go.

[mac_shinobi]

sas controllers should be compatible with SATA drives (it's part of the sas standard). Although you may find that a controller won't mix types on the same port or card. The other thing to check is what sas connectors the Dell is using.

 

I'm using an HP E200 SAS RAID card with a SAS to 4 SATA connector cable at the moment. You may find that it has only 2 connector ports for 8 drives and needs a different cable.

 

I looked into it for my apple a while ago and could not find anyway of doing it as got told that I would need the raid card for the sas drives ( so might be a different kettle of fish due to obviously not having a sas controller in the first place) although I have not heard of any converter cable but is worth a shot to try a converter cable

 

 

If you can post back with the results ie what happened as would be good to know

[SYNACK]

SATA isn't as good as SAS.

It may be marginally cheaper, and have bigger capacities, but it also has a lower MTBF (mean time between failures) so it's more likely to break.

 

... I suppose it depends on what you want to use it for...

 

You can get server grade drives like the Seagate ES line which have the same kinds of MTBF rateings at the SAS drives, they are still much cheaper for lots more storage but they are slower than the equivilent SAS drives.