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Is it possible to have a SAS to SATA.

e.g the server has SAS onboard, and I want to use SATA drives instead of the SAS ones (cheaper and easier to source here in Australia).

They have cables on this website -> http://www.techcable.com/HTML/SAS.htm

Will they work just by plugging in the SAS to the SATA using that cable?

The server is an IBM xSeries 345.

Thanks,

JD

Further to this the SAS is Ultra 320 scsi/sca2/lvd, 80 pin i think.

Darbio
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2 Answers2

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SAS and SATA have exactly the same connections (unless it's a dual port drive, which has an extra port on the underneath side). The SATA command set is a subset of the SAS commmand set. That means that a SATA drive will work perfectly well on a SAS controller. That is the case with ever SAS controller I have tried.

Please note, this is NOT the case for SAS drives on a SATA contrller, that won't work. Only SATA drives on a SAS controller.

Having said that, if your connections are 80 pin Ultra 320, then it's not a SAS controller but a SCSI contrller. It's as different as SATA and IDE. Won't work. There are SCSI to SATA adapters around, but check they can use large drives as not all can.

Hope this helps.

PD UK

  • My bad... Thanks for the help. On looking the disks are U320 disks. Which seem pretty expensive. I will look into the SCSI to SATA etc. Thanks :) – Darbio Jun 29 '10 at 08:01
  • Probably cheaper just to buy the SCSI disks. If you're stuck buying them from the outfit you got the server from you're probably up for a bit of dosh. If you can get them from a third party you'll tend to find that street prices even for IBM parts are somewhat lower. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Jun 29 '10 at 08:30
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Ultra 320 is not SAS - it's a different connector altogether. Many SAS controllers will also take SATA drives, but an Ultra 320 connector is not compatible. IIRC the X345 is an older 32 bit Xeon box, so it probably does have U320 disks. The disk backplane is not compatible with SATA. I don't think you can get a SATA backplane for this computer (i.e. replace the U320 disk subsystem with one that takes SATA disks), but even if you could the part would probably be more expensive than just buying U320 disks.

Buying SCSI disks is almost certainly your only option. If you want to get more disks on the cheap try finding the IBM part numbers (sometimes called FRU numbers) and search on ebay for the part number reference.

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
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