Question 1

I bought this drive to use in a SATAII enclosure but the extra plastic between the rows of pins prevents me from inserting it... I thought SATA III was supposed to be backwards compatible.  Is there a way to  make this work in a sata II drive enclosure?  Could I just clip out the plastic bit (somehow I doubt it, it seems to have leads on the back of it).  If not, can anyone tell me the name of the two types of connectors so that I could make sure to buy the right enclosure for this?  
 Thanks for any help you could provide.

Accepted Answer

This is a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drive. It is not compatible with SATA. Unfortunately there is no way to make it compatible with a SATA interface. Theoretically an interposer board could be utilized, but it is not at all recommended as there can be compatibility problems that may just wind up corrupting your data. You also mentioned it's to be used in an enclosure (I assume that to mean a tray/hot swap type), there would be no room for an interposer anyway. The safest thing is to either upgrade to a SAS HBA and SAS enclosure, or return the SAS drive and get a SATA drive instead.
On the contrary, and I only mention this for completeness, SATA drives are compatible with SAS, as the SAS protocol has this compatibility written in. So you could use any existing SATA drives on an a SAS enclosure and HBA, should you choose that route.

Question 2

Can anyone tell me what firmware is on this drive?

Accepted Answer

Mine list the "MX6OABB0" firmware on the drive, as reported by RAW SMART info.

Questions & Answers