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SAS drive on SATA controller?

M

mmganga

n00b
Joined
Jan 22, 2005
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Hi, so I was always a SCSI-type guy because of the higher RPM drives and lower latency/CPU utilization...

I'm contemplating adding some SAS drives which are 15K RPM but am wondering -- since it's compatible with SATA, what would be the performance impact of using a 15K RPM high performance SAS drive with a SATA controller? I'd like to use two drives and use RAID 0; would this matter? How would it compare to a dedicated SAS controller?

Suggestions, comparisons, links, more than welcome!

Many thanks!
 
SAS controller: compatible with SAS, SATA
SATA controller: compatible with SATA

You cannot use SAS drives on SATA controller even if you get the cabling to work. They use a different protocol, and SATA can't understand SAS.
 
Ok, thanks for the feedback. Can you clarrify one issue though? How come some SAS drives are advertised 'used' with SATA cabling attached? What would be the purpose for this configuration if they cannot be used on SATA controllers?

Thanks!
 
Then connector that connects to the hard drive isn't going to be a normal SATA connector for those. If you google "SAS drive connector" you will see that unlike SATA drives, SAS connectors aren't two separate connections for power and data. SAS has a bridge between them, which doesn't let you connect normal SATA cables, or SATA power to it.

I have 4 SAS controllers. 3 of them have SFF-8087 connectors, which is normally used to fan out to connect 4 drives to.What kind of drives you connect to determines what kind of cable you use. One of them however has normal SATA ports. This allows you to use your normal SATA cabling if you need to (for SATA drives), and in my case the card came with 4x SATA->SAS connectors that are backwards compatible with SATA.

The second kind of card that I have I assume is what they are talking about. It has SATA connectors, which can control SAS drives, but you cannot use normal SATA connectors to connect to SAS drives. They provide a cable that has SATA connector on one end, and the wide power+data SAS connector on the other.

If other people chime in I'll take pictures and do a better writeup.
 
adi said:
The second kind of card that I have I assume is what they are talking about. It has SATA connectors, which can control SAS drives, but you cannot use normal SATA connectors to connect to SAS drives. They provide a cable that has SATA connector on one end, and the wide power+data SAS connector on the other.
Click to expand...

This is why some used SAS drives are sold with SATA connector cable on one end, though those cables also have either a port to plug in a power connector or a breakout power plug since the SAS connector is power+data. Nice reply adi, posted everything I was about to type out :)
 
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