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I was fortunate to get in my possession 7, 8TB SAS drives that I would like to utilize in a home data storage server project I'm planning. I'm going to use an old dell precision 3630 that i got still new in box plus some minor upgrades for the project and I want to connect 3 of the SAS drives for a raid 1 set up in windows server and keep the other 4 drives as spares. The thing is, with the SAS drives I don't know where i would even start in getting to connect them to an ordinary desktop. I would like to utilize their full duplex ability and rated 12Gb/spec speeds even thought its super overkill. (I mainly want to expose myself to the technology first hand and learn about it more). To my knowledge i would need a PCIe expansion card to do that but will any work? Also how what kind of connector would i use? All I know is I'll need a SFF-8482 connector for the drive end. More insight would be appreciated, I don't mind buying expansion cards or cables. Thank you.

Hi, I have recently "accidentally" bought an 8TB sas drive, it is a Seagate ST8000NM001A 8TB HDD EXOS, I am planning to put it into a proliant n54l micro server just as extra storage, I have no real reason for raid as I am just using it for storage of non important footage recorded from a gopro, I think the proliant has the correct back planes, but if not I will use cables, I need a HBA as the n54l only supports SATA on board, I have no previous experience with sas, but I have been looking at using a Fujitsu 9211-8i. My question is, will that work? Or if anyone has any other suggestions, I think I have read that some HBA cards have a 4tb drive size limit. Thanks,

hello, everyone, I am evaluating building a NAS for the company, I have already reviewed quotes from various brands such as 45Drives, IXsystem, etc., but I found this chassis that has everything in terms of hardware, double control unit, disk bays, etc., the problem is that Unlike the other brands, this is just hardware, and I need to add the necessary software to run the NAS, no problem, I have already installed Truenas but not in an HA configuration with SAS disks, I don't know the limitations and I would like comments on this. Greetings from Paraguay! SSG-640SP-DE1CR90 | 4U | SuperServer | Products | Supermicro

I've been thinking about building a NAS build and in my research I encountered this product: ICY DOCK 24 bay 2.5 inch hot swap to 3x 5.25 inch bay ($~800) This is intriguing; in the same space that I could fit five 3.5" hard drives with some products, this fits 24 2.5" drives, this is half a magnitude higher in density! Going a step further, any standard mid tower case with 9 5.25 inch bays could fit three of these, this makes the case capable of holding 72 2.5 inch drives! This is utter madness! (example case: Old Antec 900, though I'm sure newer ones exist.) Using the Samsung 870 QVO 8TB 2.5 inch model would grant roughly 576TB of storage, costing ~$25,200. ($349.99 on amazon) This is a huge amount of money, but it appears to be pretty fair for SSDs. But it's not done yet! 144 drives might be achievable by using 72 dual m.2 to 2.5 inch adapters like this one: StarTech.com S322M225R M.2 to SATA Adapter - Dual Slot this would allow for a petabyte to be stored. At present on PcPart Picker, the cheapest m.2 2280 8TB drive costs $759.00 a piece. This means that you could get a petabyte of storage inside of a mid-tower case for the mere cost of $109,296 in storage. A similar drive, the MP600 PRO NH states 10.9 Watts on its webpage, so the power budget would be 1,596.6 Watts, plus overhead from all other components. This is probably the hardest to accommodate part. Overall, the system would require: 24 SAS ports 2000 Watt PSU (guessing on overhead) 144 8TB M.2 drives Mid Tower Case A budget of $120,000 (rough estimate) To get: 1,152 TB of storage maximum. What do you think of this? It seems like it could work and with the power issue resolved it might be a really interesting video! Edit: I realized a much cheaper option exists here, this is not SAS which could make it pretty difficult to troubleshoot cable issues. Athena Power BP-15827SAC

Hi, my system is a Z370 platform using a i5-8600k with 32 gigs of ram. (this is an older photo) For storage I've been using a Samsung 970 Evo for my boot drive along with 6 other drives for storage and other stuff. The motherboard has only 6 physical sata data ports and I want to expand it with a SAS Card if possible. The IBM ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller LSI SAS9220-8i seems like a good budget option for expansion. My only concern is that of compatibility, does my system have enough PCIE lanes for adding a SAS card? Also are there any other things I should keep in mind when trying to flash the SAS card into it mode? Thanks

Hey everyone. I bought a 3TB 7200 rpm Seagate hard drive on Amazon for a great price. It was listed as a SATA drive but it is in fact SAS when it arrived, but I know very little of it. If I buy a RAID controller in IT mode and plug in a PCIe on my desktop motherboard will it work? Do I need to do any configuration? Or do I need something else? Thank you for any help.

I recently acquired a sas card but I can't figure out how to set it up properly! I'm new to this and I naively started looking for some software, driver or utility to install, but later found a documentation pointing out the "ctlr+h" key combo at boot. Problem is that when I try to do this (as shown in the picture below) right after it blinks "WebBIOS will be executed after POST complete", the screen turns black and it either reboots to windows or hangs indefinitely with the black screen doing nothing... If WebBIOS means it needs netowrk (which I don't think) I'm connected through a working network card. I've seen other SAS Controller cards with batteries and think it's just for protection in case of power loss, but mine in any case doesn't have it if even if I'm not sure it's the culprit... This is my card: It was advertised as "LSI 2208", and this is the Amazon link where I got it. Unfortunately I had to wait around a month before trying it out as I had been busy at work and can't return it now, so I really hope I can manage it to make it work! Thank you in advance Edit: In the boot screen picture it says there are 0 virtual drives, I'm not sure if it's related, but actually I have a SFF-8087 to 4 SATA cable connected to 4 drives, 2 of which have a windows software raid mirroring, and the other 2 are normal blank drives..

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-exos-x18-st18000nm004j-18tb/p/1B4-00VK-00617 1) why exactly is sas and sata separated here on this page? 2) wait since when sas and sata HDDs are different? 3) what exactly is different between these() Hdds? ST18000NM000J ST18000NM004J or so like what is physically different in sas drives compared to sata drives? some sort of extra chip (bit different hardware) or just different firmware (or just different software)? - thank you very much

The company I work with has a relatively old server with SAS drive bays. These drives have filled up and need to be replaced. They are mechanical, and I'd like to upgrade them to SSDs. I know SAS SSDs exist, but we happen to have a few NVMe M.2s we aren't currently using. I have very limited experience with SAS and was wondering if there is any compatibility between both standards. I found the following adapter on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-M-2-U-2-Adapter-SFF-8639/dp/B073W65QX6/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=nvme+to+sas&qid=1612533136&sr=8-3 Would this simply work or would I need to configure something? Or is it just not compatible? Any help/info is appreciated

I recently came across a Seagate cheetah 15.7k 450gb HDD. However, it is using a SAS interface (image attached) I need a relatively cheap and easy way to get this drive up and running. Since my motherboard only has a SATA controller, I will need a sas HBA. Does anyone know of a good pcie sas HBA or even SATA to SAS command adapter? I don't want to spend to much money on this. But I really want to get this hard drive to work. (Sorry if this is the wrong place for this question) If anyone can help that would be great, thanks:)

Hey all, I recently obtained a PowerEdge R810, and it has a bunch of SAS hot-swappable bays in the front. It's a 2.5" enclosure and I'm wondering if a SATA SSD would work in it. I'm replacing the drives because they are very slow and old. When using Windows, it will take a good while for things to load, and Windows even froze because of the drive speed. Also, I know SAS is meant to run almost constantly, but I'm using this for home use, so I'm not concerned about constant use. I can't see my little siblings hitting the server every single second. Thank you

LTT'ers I need help! I am a complete noob when it comes to anything related to mass storage (outside of using 4 & 8-bay external enclosures and basic RAID configs) and my use case for mass storage IS GREATLY increasing at a rapid rate. I am currently weighing options and it seems that for my use case a JBOD DAS will work. But this is not totally clear to me and if require to switch to a better solution I can do so. I really just need to figure out what direction I need to execute on. I found these that set me on that path: https://www.servethehome.com/sas-expanders-diy-cheap-low-cost-jbod-enclosures-raid/ https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-direct-attached-storage-das-add-up-to-16-3-5-drive-bays-to-an-existing-server-for-less-than-300/136 My workflow is as follows: I am writing data to 3.5" HDDs (4TB-12TB capacities) in a 2-bay hot-swap dock, 4TB per day, on 3 different systems (12TB total). And once the writing process is complete I do not need to read or write from that disk, but I do need to see it and have it connected to a single system, I do not need network storage of any kind. Which is what leads me to think that a JBOD DAS is the best bet? And I can connect to one of my systems via an HBA? In the near future I will look to redundancy and higher capacity drives. However, my short-term (2-3 month) focus is just getting the best value in terms of $/TB and getting as many drives connect as possible for as cheap, but effective and safe, as possible. This is new to me but my workflow just drastically changed and I am trying to learn and implement as fast as possible. But between juggling this and other areas of growth, I am a bit lost on the data storage side. For my use case I require the following: 1. 15-bay enclosure at a minimum, 4U is fine, Ideally under 650mm long 2. Power of scaling, is there an effective way to daisy chain? IE if I add 3x more 15-bay solutions is there a possibility to daisy chain them together? 3. If I go DAS and connect via HBA, how does this limit my PCIe lane usage on a system. And would connecting it to a B450i/R3 2200G or Z490/i7-10700k work? Or is the only solution a prosumer platform? For more info required that could help please let me know. Like I said, I am lost in the sauce on this one, and need guidance. Thanks (a ton) in advance!

Hai i got an SAS HDD model ( HUS724040ALS640 ) . Can i use this hdd with a SAS to SATA convertor on a normal motherboard H81M-CS .Any possibilities of compatibility issues ? kind advice and thankyou in advance .

I’ve very new to using sas drives and a raid card but I got a raid card set up so it doesn’t have hardware raid so that it passes the drives through to the OS, and it worked fine I had freeNas installed and it had a zfs raid set up, and then for whatever reason I couldn’t log on to one day so I restarted it and then the pool was offline and I couldn’t bring it online, I wanted to install unraid anyway so I tried the trail booting from a USB and it only showed one of the 4 2TB drives same as freeNas did but when I boot the server and it goes into the raid card screen on boot I can see all 4 drives so I don’t see what could have happened or how I could get unraid to see the drives, I don’t mind if I loose all the data at this point but I just want all the drives to be seen I have one SATA 120ssd and 4 2TB SAS drives in total

Hey i recently bought an 8-bay 2.5 inch hot swap bay for sata and sas drives. https://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=267 It has 2 SFF-8643 connectors on it and i am not sure wether i can use an 8x 8087 sas controller card with adapter cables since most sources use the cables to adapt 8643 to 8087 and not the other way around. It would be a big price differnce if i could just get the 8087 controller as it would save me over 70€. If someone tell me if i can adapt it like this i would be happy since i buy all parts used, so i can't return them if it doesn't work

Local restore has a box full of these for $1 each how easily could I make a nas https://www.disctech.com/Toshiba-MK1001GRZB-100GB-SAS-2-5-SSD?partner=1011&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIqoWZuqKG8AIVJGpvBB0zXgjOEAQYASABEgI8MPD_BwE

Hi Guys, I´m trying to build a nas from some old sas drives i have got laying around. the only problem is that i dont know witch hardware i should use that don't makes me bankrupt. Ive already got 34 sas drives (22 2,5" and 12 3,5") and a lot of ddr3 and ddr2 ram. everything else i would need to buy. any suggestions ?

I've looked all over the internet without much luck so maybe someone here can help me. I've had a NetApp DS4246 that I've had for a few months now, which I acquired from a reputable source. It has two IOM6s installed. I recently bought an LSI 9207-8e from a different reputable source and it came configured with firmware version 20. I also have a QSFP+ (SFF-8436) to Mini SAS (SFF-8088) cable which I'm convinced is fine (for reasons I'll get into below). I currently only have two 12TB SATA HDDs. I've been pulling my hair out trying to get this to work with my system for days now. I'm running Windows 10 Pro, and switching to a different OS isn't an option unfortunately. The behavior has been super inconsistent and erratic. 99% of the time, when I connect the disk shelf, only one of the two drives are detected. The behavior switches up from time to time but tends to stay the same for at least some duration. For instance, for a while, every time I unplugged one drive and plugged it back in, that drive would become the detected one, and if the other drive was the one being detected previously, it'd disappear from the system (not just unmount, but it'd be gone from disk management too). Then for a while only one drive consistently would take priority and if the other drive was reconnected, it'd have no effect. I could constantly unplug and replug the connectors and every time only one drive would come up, but on extremely rare occasion, both drives would connect and mount properly, and during those times, I've tested reading and writing to both drives. I found someone online who claimed to have been using the same HBA with Windows 10 Pro without any issues, and was able to get in touch with them. Turns out they were using an older version of the firmware, so I tried flashing the same firmware in the hopes that it would resolve the issue. After a few reboots and reconnecting everything, I thought it worked for a bit, but turns out it was just another fluke and shortly afterwards it went back to only detecting one drive. I tested another version of the firmware as well, with no luck. At some point during all this, the HBA was checked in its BIOS as well and it is detecting both drives. After a while, I of course began to suspect the cable, but this was quickly ruled out. Every time I boot into Linux, both drives connect immediately, on every reconnect of the cable. If I'm in Windows and only one drive is being detected, and I don't touch the cable at all and reboot into Linux, both drives are there. Same the other way. I also installed MegaRAID on Windows and its able to see that two drives are present in the disk shelf, even though Disk Management doesn't show it. By now I didn't really know what else I could test, so I purchased a LSI 9200-8e from the same source I obtained the disk shelf from. They weren't sure why I was having issues with the 9207, but they told me that 9200s are all they ever use and that they work fine in Windows. In fact, they demonstrated this for me firsthand when I was at their warehouse the first time around when I purchased the disk shelf. However, when I installed it into my system, I immediately had the same issues that I had with the 9207. I tested both cards in different PCIe slots as well with no change. Out of desperation, I tested the cards in an entirely different system I had on hand as well, and they behave the same way there too. What the hell is going on? I know these cards can work in Windows. There's numerous reports of this online, and both of my sources tell me this should be working as well. Does ANYONE know what I can do at this point?

Hi Everyone I need some help (if there is even a way) in accessing SAS drives that are in RAID 6 via a hardware raid controller ? We were running M-Files on the server and the mobo went (Lenovo M5 3650), and we are not going to replace it as buying a new server is cheaper than having Lenovo replace the mobo. We have backups to get everything back up and running, but would be nice to retrieve the data and not just toss it.. Any ideas on how to get in there, machine does not power up at all, stuck on Initializing, server techs have been out and their diagnosis was to replace mobo.

I recently found a great deal on eBay for some sas drives, and I know sas to sata converters exist, but I was wondering if the sas drives would work with a sata interface if I just cut out the piece of plastic in between the power and data pins or is their some software or electrical difference between the two that would cause this not to work?

Hello guys, i recently bought 4 new NL-SAS Drives (ST1000NX0453) with 1 TB and I want to use them in my Dell R610. Originally there was a PERC H700 Raid-Card installed, I wanted to create an Raid-Array with these Disks, but I always got errors. Then I bought an H200 preflashed to IT-Mode, connected the Drives. The drives were directly recognized by the Controller, then I decided to boot into Windows, but when I was trying to initialize the disks, I immedialtely got an I/O error. I belive its something with incompatibility of these Drives and the Controller. The Drives are SAS 3 and I think the Controller is SAS 2 but from what I've read they should be compatible. If anyone knows more about Sas and stuff can you tell me if these Drives work with the Controller or why this isn't working?

Hello everyone, following one of my other posts about troubleshooting a bad card, I bought an LSI card on the recommendation of a forum member. I have it on a Windows 10 system (Ryzen 7 3700X on x470 if that matters) and the drivers are installed and Windows sees the raid card just fine without issue, but the issue comes to seeing the drives. The card is brand new (or factory settings at least) from Newegg, and the instructions basically just tell you that Windows is an operating system and an operating system is needed to use the card, so basically useless. I have a single cable that splits into 4 sata headers with an adapter for sas for power plus data. Other than insert the card and install the drivers, I have done nothing else and the drive do not show up, and I feel like I'm missing something obvious, please help, thank you

Hey guys. I bought a Seagate Exos 8E7 6TB HDD. My question is, can i connect to that hdd to my motherboard through a U.2 port? I already have a U.2 connector on my mobo so i just have to buy the cable, but i read, there have some versions of SFF connectors. For example: SFF-8639/8636 and 84xx series, and i dont know if thats hard drive connector is compatible with the U.2 port or the SFF-8639 variant.

Hello, I have a question on how to find a perfect Raid Card for my operations. My server that i'm currently looking to build has a PCIE x8 3.0 interface. From what I can assume with Raid Cards, the two things I should be looking for is high cache value and PCIE Bandwidth. So far, I researched a PCIE x8 3.0 Connection at 8GB a second, while drives like SATA and SAS are usually 12 to 6Gbit a second. I'm going to use an external SAS Raid card so I can utilize DAS interfaces for a total of 80 Drives being daisychained together via the SAS Connection. So theoretically I wouldn't the Raid Controller wouldn't be a bottleneck since im choosing a speedier interface than PCIE 2.0 and SATA drives cannot realistically meet that 6Gbit per drive, rather than multiple drives. Atleast in my head this makes sense. ^ If my question isn't clear in short: What would be the bottleneck the RoC (Raid Controller), Drives, PciE Interface? My Raid Card i'm looking at is (https://a.co/d/i7dA0sF) Thank you

I'm messing around with some SAS HDDs I have lying around however some models won't initialize. (windows server 2022, right clicking the drive in disk management and clicking 'Initialize' results in 'The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.' drives are connected via a Supermicro backplane to an IBM M5110 (in IT Mode) (based off LSI 9207-8i). Drives that work: ST1000NM0023 ST2000NM0023 ST32000645SS Drives that don't work (there are multiple of each drive, it's highly unlikely it's an issue with dead drives): ST1000NM0001 ST3000NM0023 Weirdly 2 of the dozen or so ST31000424SS work fine but the others don't... The 1TB drives that don't initialize display as ~917GB, all the ones that do show as ~931GB... This lead me to believe it was a 520 Byte vs 512 Byte sector thing that I ran into before but googling it both drives show as 512 Byte sectors.... Any ideas? Edit: it might actually be the 520 vs 512 byte sectors, I guess the seller had them formatted as 520 byte. I'm reformatting one now to see if it works but it's going to take hours....