SATA/SAS Drives

[MatthewL]

I have got a Dell PowerEdge 1950 which has SAS drives in it, they are 2.5" ones. Now to me they look like SATA drives, could I not just get a 2.5" SATA drive and chuck it in, would it work or not?

 

I have never had any experience of SAS drives so a little advice would be helpful.

 

I don't need anything fancy, just something cheap to chuck some data on.

[SYNACK]

SAS drives are different and it depends on the RAID controller and backplane as to whether you can use SATA drives aswell. Most of the new HPs do allow this but you can only have one type of drive in a RAID volume. SATA drives are also much slower than SAS drives so you would be dropping at least 30% of the speed from your current system and a bit of the reliability as SAS drives are speced higher. You can get around this a bit by using more SATA drives in place of the existing SAS drives but it is all based on your RAID cards abilities and your requirements.

 

edit: from the specc http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/1950_specs.pdf it looks like the 2.5 backplane only supports SAS whereas the 3.5 supports both if you have the optional PERC 5i controller.

Edited January 12, 2011 by SYNACK

[MatthewL]

Thanks for the reply back on this.