1

I may be receiving a Dell PER710, no drives, but supports 8 x 2.5" SAS/SATA. More concerned with storage than performance, but I’m no so knowledgeable of server hardware. Can we really plug in either type of drive or is there some kind of physical reconfiguration required to switch between the 2? And yes, I do feel like a total noob asking this…

@Dell_Technologies

11 Spice ups
2

You can plug sata drives into sas connectors, but sas drives can only be plugged into sas connectors.

sas adapters are downwards compatible with sata, but sata adapters cannot handle sas.

6 Spice ups
3

Thanks for the quick response, you were much faster than my trying to pose the question properly to Google.

4

Also make sure if you plan on hot swapping the drive s out that the enclosure supports SAS. Most just support Sata. I had a hell of a time trying to get SAS drives on a raid card working with the right enclosure. Actually I gave up on trying to configure it all just right and went with SSD drives.

5

That Dell model should support either SAS or SATA, which if you get Dell drives will be near-line SAS, SATA drives using a SAS connector and are hot swap drives. I’m in the process of upgrading two of those myself with 1TB drives of the near line flavor just for storage sake.

6

Most SAS RAID controllers I have worked with will support SATA but you can not mix them, all one or all the other.

7

You can plug-in SATA drive to SAS port but unless it’s a server grade SATA spindle such a swap is not going to do any good to you at the end of the day…