Cheapest way of attaching an SAS drive

stoofa

stoofa

stoofa

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At work we've ended up with some spare 74GB 15,000rpm SAS drives.
Now I know 74GB isn't exactly a lot, however it got me thinking.
If I had one as my boot drive, just Windows and a few applications installed and then kept my 500GB SATA drives for main storage...

Anyway - what is the cheapest way of connecting an SAS drive to a PC?
I'm assuming I need some kind of SAS controller, something either PCI/e or PCI-x
I wouldn't really need RAID on the controller.

I see both Adaptec and Promise do SAS RAID controllers, but we're looking at around £160+vat
Probably above and beyond what I'm looking for.
Anyone recommend makes/models to look for?
 
I'd imagine unless you can get some sort of drive adapter you'll be forced to get a controller card.

Try looking for model number - ADP-4000, should at least give you an idea of what to look for.
 
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SAS is serial SCSI so a controller card is the only way to go. In terms of makes & models I'd be sticking with Adaptec unless you can find a Dell PERC card going cheap at auction.
 
You're looking at around £200 for a bog standard Adaptec SAS PCI-E controller and another £25 for the cable if it doesn't come with any.
 
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The drives are at work and I'm safely home now...
However, I know that they are definitely Seagate.
So with the age of the Dell server taken into account (very new) I would say I'm 99% sure they are:

Cheetah® 15K.5 SAS 3Gb/s 73-GB Hard Drive - ST373455SS

It would appear that Promise sell a pretty basic SAS controller which shouldn't be too pricey.
Only problem is nowhere in the UK seems to sell them yet.

Before I even consider all of this - anybody got any experience as to just how noisy the SAS drives are?
We have some servers with them in at work, however as they are in a noisy server room it is difficult to judge just how much noice they make.
 
I can hopefully tell you in a week or 2, depending on when my graphics card arrives.

I actually got 2 of those very same drives going into my new build (see sig).

How many drives you got and what RAID level (if any) do you want to use?
 
Oh right. Probably ok to ust get the cheapest PCI-E SAS controller available.

Check out LSI if you haven't already. They're usually a bit cheaper than Adaptec.
 
Stoofa, did you get a controller card in the end? I'm interested in this too as we have some spare disks at my work just gathering dust :)
 
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