SAS Drives work with SATA Connections?

lauxenburg

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Feb 9, 2009
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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/enterprise/savvio/10K.4/100539221c.pdf

Thanks.
 

MichaelB010

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Hi,

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

Cheers,
Michael
 

lauxenburg

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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.
 

wchayes

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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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