SAS Drives work with SATA Connections?

lauxenburg

March 26, 2010 10:28:42 PM

I want to populate a storage server with SAS drives instead of standard SATA drives. However, as you may be aware SAS controllers are insanely expensive (in my opinion) Minimum $500 for a decent one.

I know that the connectors appear the same. I was reading through the doccumentation on the Savvio 10.4k drives on Seagate's website and in section 3.0, second paragraph it says something about compatibility between SATA and SAS. Does this mean I can take a cheap SATA 6.0gbs controller and use it with one of these drives.

The wording is confusing, so any interpretations are great.

Link:

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals...

Thanks.

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MichaelB010

March 26, 2010 10:32:00 PM

lauxenburg said:

I want to populate a storage server with SAS drives instead of standard SATA drives. However, as you may be aware SAS controllers are insanely expensive (in my opinion) Minimum $500 for a decent one.

I know that the connectors appear the same. I was reading through the doccumentation on the Savvio 10.4k drives on Seagate's website and in section 3.0, second paragraph it says something about compatibility between SATA and SAS. Does this mean I can take a cheap SATA 6.0gbs controller and use it with one of these drives.

The wording is confusing, so any interpretations are great.

Link:

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals...

Thanks.

Hi,

You can use SATA drives on SAS controllers without any problems but not the otherway round unfortuneately.

Cheers,
Michael

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lauxenburg

March 26, 2010 10:59:09 PM

MichaelB010 said:

Hi,

You can use SATA drives on SAS controllers without any problems but not the otherway round unfortuneately.

Cheers,
Michael

Aww shucks that's too bad....I really wanted to try out SAS. Oh well, I guess an ES.2 won't be the worst thing ever.

Thanks for the reply.

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MichaelB010

March 26, 2010 11:21:23 PM

Adaptec have a good article that you might like to look at with regard to SAS / SATA.

http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/B2B7FEA9-F59B-46EB-...

Depends on what you want to achieve and long term scalability.
The ES.2's do like like a good choice to go for though

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wchayes

April 16, 2011 10:00:28 PM

You can use Sata drives on a SAS controller because the connections are the same and the SAS controller knows what to do with a SATA drive but the reason you can't use a SAS drive on a SATA controller is that the SAS drive speaks a different language (ie. SCSI Command Set)

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