SAS Drive vs SATA III PORT

[daniel_542]

Hi People,
I am considering buying 2 of these:
HP MB1000FBZPL
But want to confirm whether these SAS drives are able to connect to a SATA III port and work as a SATA drive using an adapter of sorts?
I cant find any direct answer via a google search.

 

[R_1]

SATA will connect to a SAS port.
SAS will not connect to a SATA port.
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1904656/connect-sas-hard-drive-sata-interface.html
if you get those drives you will need a Serial Attached Storage SAS controller

 

[daniel_542]

My motherboard is going to be the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution
It has 6 SATA ports and 2 SAS ports on board but you cant use both SATA and SAS concurrently for RAID use.
My aim is to set up RAID stripe array for boot drive using my 2 SSDs and a RAID 5 array for DATA storage.
With the fact that my motherboard cant do RAID on the SAS ports coupled with RAID on the SATA ports, I need to link all the drives to the SATA connectors. The reason I am asking this is because I can pick up SAS drives in bulk cheaper than I can SATA so I am kind of hoping someone can confirm whether these drives will accept a connect to a SATA port or not as I know some do and others don't. I am waiting on ASUS confirming whether the board can do SAS on its ich10 SATA controller.

 

[molletts]

You'll need more than two drives for a RAID5 array anyway so if you're going down the SAS route, you'll need to buy an add-in SAS host adaptor for them if you've only got 2 SAS ports onboard. You could skip the SSD RAID0 (it's pointless and simply reduces reliability and increases complexity) and spend the money you save on hardware RAID for the HDDs.

 

[daniel_542]

I have 3 1tb drives at present - all on SATA ports. I plan adding another one and putting them all in a RAID5 array (I understand the implications of losing 1 drive of space to the parity). My reason for wanting RAID5 array is that I want to safeguard my data against another hdd failure as I recently had a disk failure and lost 500+ GB of data.
I could forgo the RAID0 array as it doesn't massively affect performance anyway (I decided to do this as I was told it would help with performance) but even if I do, I still have the issue of whether SAS drive will run on my board or not.
I have found SAS drives are coming up cheaper for me than SATA so far (for 1tb drives anyways)

 

[molletts]

Having had a look at the details of the motherboard, you may have to use your OS's built-in software RAID support to include SAS drives in an array. The ICH doesn't support SAS (it's purely a SATA controller) - the SAS ports are attached to a separate dedicated Marvell SAS HBA. The onboard RAID capability won't support arrays spanning more than one controller (some disks on the ICH, some on the SAS chip) and you'd have to be careful even with a discrete SAS RAID card - although they almost all support using SATA disks, they don't all support mixing SATA and SAS in one array.

As you won't be booting off the hard disks, software RAID should suffice. If you're running Windows, you'll need at least Win8.1 (or Windows Server) to get RAID5 support. I don't know what Windows' softRAID performance/reliability is like; on Linux, my experience is that it's generally faster than hardware RAID even on modest hardware (on the old Pentium III I used to use as my home server, mdraid was twice as fast as a PERC4 PCI-X card using 3 x 15k U320 SCSI drives in RAID5). Given that the majority of unscheduled server downtime I've had over the last decade or so at work has been due to RAID controller failures, I'm inclined to say that softRAID may also be more reliable.

If you do decide to use software RAID, ECC RAM is pretty much mandatory as a memory error can lead to catastrophic data corruption very quickly. Fortunately, your board supports it.