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SAS controller with SATA-type ports?

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farscapesg1

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OK, stupid question here but I'm going to ask anyways.

I have a Supermicro X8ST3-F motherboard with a built in LSI1068E SAS controller. The ports that connect to this look like standard SATA ports though. I also have 4 SAS 300GB 10K drives pulled from some old Dell PE 2950 servers that I would like to pass through to my OI VM as a stripped/mirrored pool for ESXi storage (should give me better performance and space than the 4 160GB laptop 7200RPM drives I'm running in the same config right now).

Can I use standard SATA cables and power to connect these drives? Or do I need some sort of special cable to go from the SATA connector type to the SAS connection on the back of the drive?

The other question is can I mix the four SAS drives with the 4 SATA WD Green drives I have in a RAIDZ config for media storage on the same controller? I plan on purchasing a M1015 controller to seperate them before moving all my data to it, but want to run some test/benchmarks against them first...
 
SAS uses standard SATA connections (actually SAS is based on the electrical specifications of SATA). So you can use standard SATA cables to connect the SAS drives to your SATA connector based motherboard.

As to the mixing of the SAS and WD green drives, I don't use ZFS, so I hope that some other experts on that matter can give you an answer.
 
thanks! I guessed that I could probably use the same cabling... just wasn't sure and didn't want to risk damagin the motherboard by connecting them ;)

ZFS isn't really the issue with mixing drives. I'm more concerned if I can mix drives on the same controller. As far as ZFS goes, the drives will be in seperate vdevs so that isn't a problem.
 
My SAS drive cannot use regular SATA cables, because of the extra bridge between power and data connectors.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200431&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Cables-_-STARTECH-_-12200431

Second picture shows the bridge, and how normal cables won't be able to connect.

Also found this picture that kind of shows the drive end:
http://files.discountechnology.com/products/FUJ-MBA3073RC-BN-OE-DEL/FUJ-MBA3073RC-BN-OE-DEL-image1.jpg

As long as your SAS drives don't have that extra signaling bridge, you can use normal cables. If not, you have to use the cable like the Newegg link, or a hotswap cage.
 
Yep... that was what I was afraid of. Just pulled out a spare SATA cable and compared it to the back of the drive and it won't connect... at least without notching the plastic ;) I may have to see if I have some extra Molex-SATA power cables and if I can notch those also to make them fit. Not going to tear up my SATA power cables for my Corsair power supply...
 
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