Will this SAS setup work on my desktop?

[deziant]

A friend recently gave me a Seagate 300gb SAS cheetah HD and a Dell SAS storage controller adapter. The problem is I have never used an SAS drive and the ports are different between the HD and adapter.

Will these work in my desktop if I get the cable or is the controller for servers only?


Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 300 GB 15000RPM SAS
Dell Poweredge Dual SAS 5/E PCI-E Controller Card CN-OFD467

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Should work fine, assuming working hardware, correct cabling, and correct driver configuration.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Not easily. That hard drive is out of some sort of disk array. It looks like its a FC (fiber channel) hard drive with a SAS bridge put on it (This was common in older arrays using high-speed hard drives when most were shipping with fiber channel and storage manufacturers would add a SAS bridge for it to interface with their SAS array offerings).

Your real issue is that you're unlikely to find an external 4x SAS connector (in this case, the Dell card is using screw-type CX4 or SFF-8470) to an internal SAS connector (SFF-8482) for low cost. It isn't a standard type of cable and they as such the cheapest I can see one is on some one-off sites for $70 or $100 for a more reputable site. You would also have to figure out a way to supply power to the drive (usually from a molex pigtail off your conversion cable) since SFF-8470 is only for data transfer, not power.

So the answer is you could, but the cabling costs would be high, and you would still need to figure out how to power the drive. Combined with the fact that the drive's only real benefit is about 75 more IOPS over 3TB SATA hard drives (which SSD's can easily eclipse that number), and I would say if it were me, it's not worth the cost to try to get working unless you already have a shelf array the drive cage can fit into.

 

[deziant]

Not easily. That hard drive is out of some sort of disk array. It looks like its a FC (fiber channel) hard drive with a SAS bridge put on it (This was common in older arrays using high-speed hard drives when most were shipping with fiber channel and storage manufacturers would add a SAS bridge for it to interface with their SAS array offerings).

Your real issue is that you're unlikely to find an external 4x SAS connector (in this case, the Dell card is using screw-type CX4 or SFF-8470) to an internal SAS connector (SFF-8482) for low cost. It isn't a standard type of cable and they as such the cheapest I can see one is on some one-off sites for $70 or $100 for a more reputable site. You would also have to figure out a way to supply power to the drive (usually from a molex pigtail off your conversion cable) since SFF-8470 is only for data transfer, not power.

So the answer is you could, but the cabling costs would be high, and you would still need to figure out how to power the drive. Combined with the fact that the drive's only real benefit is about 75 more IOPS over 3TB SATA hard drives (which SSD's can easily eclipse that number), and I would say if it were me, it's not worth the cost to try to get working unless you already have a shelf array the drive cage can fit into.

Thanks for the advice. I will probably wait for a SSD.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Depending on if your friend is cool with you selling it, you could get $50 or maybe a little more for the hard drive, and $20-$25 for the RAID controller. That puts you just a stone's throw away from the heavily discounted 128GB Crucial M500. It's not the fastest SSD, but it's still fast enough to beat the Cheetah you're trying to connect easily and only costs $80. In the <$100 market its easily the best bang for buck SSD going right now, and if you're spending $100 on getting that hard drive to work, vs getting the SSD, its not even a decision IMO 🙂

 

[npaladin-2000]

A SAS/5e HBA is easily worth $100, not $25.

To the OP: your friend gave you two miscellaneous devices that don't work together. Which is probably why he dumped them on you. 🙂 That SAS controller is an external SAS controller, meant to connect servers with external managed arrays like the MD3000 series, or external tape units.

That hard drive, I'd like to see a better pic of the label, but it looks suspiciously like an older-style "Nearline SAS" drive, which is a SATA drive with a SAS bridge attached to it.