Question 1

Can you please confirm this has the smart carrier?

Accepted Answer

This does not include the mounting carrier, it is just the hard drive you see pictured. When I ordered them, it was a very simple procedure to mount them into the smart carrier that held the drive I was replacing.

Question 2

what type mobo should I use for the sas drives?

Accepted Answer

While an SAS hard drive will "drive" a few specifications of your motherboard, many other aspects of your environment will contribute as well.  Regarding this paticular drive, to make any connection to your motherboard your must have an SAS capable controller and connection, otherwise, you will have to add an additional controller interface as we did.  The motherboard we utilized only supports SATA.  We will have lower performance SATA drives in our server as well so adding a high performance SAS adapter worked well.  For this drive in paticular, which is capable of 6GBps through put, making sure all the supporting hardware is also capable of the same throughput maximizes the investment in this high speed enterprise performance drive.

Most important in a motherboard selection is the desired Operating System.  You must be able to acquire appropriate hardware drivers for your motherboard hardware and respective OS.  In our case, we are deploying with Linux, so all our hardware must have Linux drivers.  Second it was a server.  Third, we established an overall budget. Fourth, we selected a CPU Processor family within that budget, etc.  Hope this helps.

Question 3

Is this backward compatible with SAS 3.0 GB interface I own an HP XW8600 workstation currently has 147gb SAS 15k rpm 3GB drive I need to upgrade this to a 300 GB SAS 15K
will this work ? also is there some differences in the cables/connectors ? for 3.0gb SAS and 6.0gb SAS drive

, I also will want to buy a 500gb or 600 gb SAS drive for this machine that will be a data drive can something be recommended if I need cables or converters in case the 6.0 Gb interface is different from the 3.0 ports on my machine

Accepted Answer

This is a SATA drive, not SAS.

Question 4

I want to connect these drives to an Adaptec ARS-3805 RAID controller. The cables that came with the RAID card are not that same as the connector on the hard drive. What type of adapter do I need to make this work? The drive has a SSF-8482 connector and I need to plug into a standard SAS/SATA cable. ANy advice?

Accepted Answer

I think you need a SAS to SATA adapter similar to this (remove the spaces, newegg won't allow posting urls)

ht tp: / / compeve. com/ima ges/HP _sas_ada pter_comp eve.jpg .

My understanding is SAS connectors were made physically different because of the voltage difference that SAS requires and to ensure people weren't trying to connect SAS and SATA where they shouldn't.  The adapter doesn't actually convert the logic.  It just enables you to connect bare cables to it.  SAS is typically put into hot-plug drive bays, so I think that's why this information is obscured.

Hope this helps.

Questions & Answers