SATA on SAS Backplane/controller

T

TC10284

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 8, 2006
Messages
213
I am helping a friend with a Dell Poweredge 2900. The server is currently running Server 2003 and is working fine. He has a program for his business that needs a RAID 1 setup. The other drives in the four drive bays above are populated and assigned for other uses. He has an extra four SAS slots available on his server. All he needs are the drives and the mounting bracket from Dell. I have worked with SCSI and RAID setups quite a lot before, but not SAS as of yet. I've read that SAS is backward compatible with SATA.

Is there anything majorly wrong with running SATA drives on a SAS controller with preexisting SAS drives? Will it degrade performance? I do realize that SAS drives are more "industrial" and such. He requires at least 150GB on the RAID 1 set. What would you get - SAS or SATA?

Should I expect any problems setting up an additional RAID set on the PERC controller?
 
No you are in the right forum.


The Dell Perc card is an LSI I believe. SATA should work just fine on it. Just plug them as long as the backplane is wired correctly you will be fine. There will no performance loss on the existing SAS drives since each drive has its own link.
 
You will loose a bit of performance on the SATA drives due to the SAS controller having to emulate SATA specs, but it's a tiny loss.
 
i'd do 146gb drives x2 in raid-1, if your size estimation is approximate. if he needs 150gb usable, to start, after formatting, then i'd either do 2x320gb SATA raid-1 or 2x300gb sas raid-1. if the data is important, and you need the drives to last a while, i'd go sas
 
novadude said:
You will loose a bit of performance on the SATA drives due to the SAS controller having to emulate SATA specs, but it's a tiny loss.
Click to expand...

I can say with Intel X25-E that an LSI SAS controller is actually quicker then an Intel SATA controller, at least in terms of IOPS. Now if you have to run though an expander there may be a bit of delay with certian models.
 
If it is a business that this is for, and the server is still under contract from Dell, buy dell sever hard drives.

Putting your own in there might cause warranty issues. (dumb, I know, but true)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top