SAS 6Gb/s HD work on SAS 3Gb/s controller?

[lifeblood]

I am replacing a bad Seagate 500GB SAS 3Gb/s drive that I use in a Dell NAS device. The drives are in RAID 1+0. I found a similar Seagate drive but it is SAS 6Gb/s. I assume it is backward compatible?

 

[Soulkeeper]

as long as the connector is the same it shouldn't be a problem
even then it likely wouldn't be a problem with a cable/converter

Just to be safe it might be worth searching google to see if others have used the particular drive with that NAS/raid hardware.

 

[Emulex]

As long as it has at least the number of logical blocks as the old drive,and preferably the same sector size (ie don't mix 512/4K) then it will work fine.

I had to replace some 3G single ported sas drives with dual-ported 6G sas drives and they've been working happily for the last 3 years..

If the devices are fan-out rather than sas-expander, the raid card may in fact run the drive at 6G speed while the others run at 3G, typically sas expanders cause the least common denominator.


500gb? Is that a nearline drive? real sas drives come in 36,72,146,300,450,600,900gb sizes. the nearline (sas controller on sata mechanics) was the 120/240/250/500/1000/1500/2000/2500/3000/4000 meg.

I have a bunch of 500gb 3.5" and 2.5" seagate sas drives if you need a perfect fit for some reason. They are old 3gbps design. I don't trust that junk.

 

[lifeblood]

500gb? Is that a nearline drive? real sas drives come in 36,72,146,300,450,600,900gb sizes. the nearline (sas controller on sata mechanics) was the 120/240/250/500/1000/1500/2000/2500/3000/4000 meg.

Its a Dell Powervault 500 (NAS) with 500Gb drives. Its interesting you mention that because I was looking up the hard drives on Seagates website and they referred to the drive as nearline and I didn't know what they meant. Now I know. That's annoying because Dell advertised it as having SAS drives when it really had cheaper SATA/SAS hybrid drives.

Thanks for the info.