sata or sas

[RobTi]

Hi running unraid for media and a vm and on the lookout for a new 18 or 20 Tb drive, would you go sata or sas if the price wasn't too much of a difference ?

 

[jigger]

Hard to say. I wouldn’t add a SAS HBA for a single drive though.

 

[RobTi]

Hard to say. I wouldn’t add a SAS HBA for a single drive though.

thanks i had to add one as i ran out of sata ports

 

[Avalon]

Context is important here, and you’ve omitted the important bits. If you plan to scale up to say using a backplane, then SAS is generally a better choice, also look at He drives as the MTBF is insane. If you are just running a desktop, then HBA’s are an inexpensive was to add more SATA drives, a 1-4 breakout on a card that uses 11w isn’t awful, you just get SATA rather than SAS, just go 3008 rather than earlier and avoid the Adaptec cards no matter what you read. I run a ‘few’ 3-4U SM chassis and mainly go with HGST helium filled SAS drives, that said I did grab 100TB of SATA drives a while back as the price point was too low to say no to.

 

[RobTi]

Hi self built server using new desktop components and ran out of sata ports so got an old Dell H310 IT Mode HBA 6Gbps SAS SATA Mini-SAS PCIe 2.0x8 card and added a couple of sata drives to it, so need another drive and just wondered if I should go sas, only used atm for unraid as media server with plex and a home assistant vm, also half my drives are exos and the others are Ironwolf

 

[Avalon]

Then its a moot point, once you break the channel down to 4 SATA, it’s effectively 4xSATA. If you were running SAS its 2xSAS (SAS uses dual controllers). Could you jank something with 2XSATA and 1xSAS? probably, but you are adding multiple additional points of failure and cost for no obvious gain.

 

[RobTi]

Then its a moot point, once you break the channel down to 4 SATA, it’s effectively 4xSATA. If you were running SAS its 2xSAS (SAS uses dual controllers). Could you jank something with 2XSATA and 1xSAS? probably, but you are adding multiple additional points of failure and cost for no obvious gain.

That was why I was considering moving to sas as I upgrade to save getting crosstalk errors with multiple data cables in the long term

 

[RobTi]

Then its a moot point, once you break the channel down to 4 SATA, it’s effectively 4xSATA. If you were running SAS its 2xSAS (SAS uses dual controllers). Could you jank something with 2XSATA and 1xSAS? probably, but you are adding multiple additional points of failure and cost for no obvious gain.

So can I ask I have two sata connected to this card if they were removed and only sas connected to the card would that be any better ?

 

[Avalon]

You could run the channels independently with UR, so one is 4xSATA and the other is 2xSAS, but honestly, unless you get a seriously good deal on SAS drives, I would stick as you are.

 

[RobTi]

You could run the channels independently with UR, so one is 4xSATA and the other is 2xSAS, but honestly, unless you get a seriously good deal on SAS drives, I would stick as you are.

Thank you