Hello all,
Iv come across an offer for a second hand enterprise drive (hgst Huh728080AL4200, 8tb drive) for 160 euros. I have a z77 motherboard. Would it be posssible to use an external controller for this? Is it somewhat reasonable?
Any information is welcome!
SAS is SATA with power plug combined. There are SAS to SATA adapters.
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Thanks! So despite the controller differences (?) they will work at full rated speeds?
Yes, as fast as the slowest component. SAS is just a different connector to better suit hotswap capability AFAIK.
SAS is not directly backwards compatible with a SATA controller, but SATA is backwards compatibly with a SAS controller. However @SudoSaibot is correct, there are conversion boards, SAS is a faster standard than SATA as it allows for some fault tolerance (that you wouldn’t be using) so any bottleneck would be the conversion board, but that should still be much faster than any hard disk.
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So no need for a raid card, thats nice. I was planning on buying a hp P400, but a simple converter will do then. Is a raid card worth messing with? second hand p400´s can be found for around 20e. I´ve always stayed away from raid and such things for the sake of sipliciyty, but now the opertunity is presenting itself.
Thnaks for the help anyway lads!
I actually have a P400 in my server. They are decent enough, but cannot do JBOD, in case that’s important for you, and also they are designed for server use, going directly to the back plane for hot-swap drives.
So although its not a bad idea to get a SAS raid card, that’s kind of a different subject. If you simply want to attach your SAS drives to a SATA controller (like the one on your mobo) then the simplest way is to get adaptors.
EDIT: if you do want to keep SAS, which has its benefits. You might be better with this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-462919-001-Smart-Array-P410-8-Port-SAS-RAID-Controller-/282572664905?epid=1856598996&hash=item41caa4b049:g:yPEAAOSwSgJXOMM7 rather than the P400. But if you are interested, do more research. This is going only off a quick ebay search
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Belated thanks SudoWolf and Eddie.
After having done a good deal of reading, iv decided not to do raid, and am leaning towards a HBA card+firmware.
The suggested P400/410 will not recognise 8tb drives as do a lot of options. There are also popular choices like the IBM M1015 and LSI SAS9220-8i. But these options are relatively expensive (~50euro on ebay). I’m looking to keep this as cheap as possible.
The available choice is overwhelming.
This list of adaptec sas cards which support 8tb drives has been useful. I have found some on this website, the adaptec cards also seem to support windows 10. Though i’m not sure they do HBA.
Would these be a good purchase? It seems everything is compatible, have i missed anything completely obvious? 
My knowlege comes from my own research and my limited knowlege of my orn raid card. So it sounds like by this point you know more than I for your question.
I think by this point the best I can recommend is when you find a card you like, try searching around to see if there are any problems with it. In case it is cheap for a reason
That’s fair enough thanks for the pointers anyway, I’ll post my finding here just for a little psa on that part.
Hello again all, Little update. The drive I bought has 4kn sectors. The card I bought Adaptec series 5 does not support this. So it doesn’t work, adapted series 6 and above have support for this feature. So the search continues.
Did you check for firmware updates? Adaptec is kind of ass with their firmware updates, but you never know.
I did indeed. I thought the card was dud, even tired a couple SATA drives. Took me a while to realise that 4kn drives aren’t supported. Anything above the 5 series starts to get very expensive.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
Hello again Level1Techs,
Sorry for the thread necro, but i figure its best to post a solution. Maybe it’ll end up helping someone.
Finally got round to trying another card. This time i used my head and used the HGST compatibility search tool. Cheapest card is the LSI 9207-4i4e.
It can be flashed to the HBA IT mode (its much easier to do this via the MGM (MegaRaid Management System) software, than with the USB method).
Then just format the disk in windows.
Ran crystal diskmark on it, and seqQ32 test gives good numbers (234 MB/s, up and down) and the rest are dirt. I think maybe the card doesn’t fully support 4k drives, not sure. Time to go learn about that.
Lots learned. Happy tinkering.