Upgrade your Consumer PC storage with SAS - Part 1 - Basic overview - 6
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- Опубликовано: 20 янв 2023
- Let's venture into SAS.
This is a very brief video about the pros vs cons about SAS and SATA.
On one hand it's more performant, cheaper, and more dense.
On the other hand, it's not not as plug and play as you would think.
let's go on an adventure!
If you like the video, click the button and subscribe to help me out. I appreciate you! 
Наука
SATA is a subset of the SAS spec. Which is one reason you can freely plug a SATA drive into a SAS controller or backplane with no issues. SAS has much better data and power integrity. SAS drives, if you compare the spec sheet on a similar SAS and SATA drive. You will see that the SAA drive has much lower error rate. A SAS drive usually has a Error rate (non-recoverable, bits read) of 1 in 10'15 compared to 1 in 10'14 for SATA. That is 10 and 14 or 15 zeros behind it. Whilst SATA III maxes out at 6gb transfer speed. SAS can go way beyond that. Current Gen SAS controllers can do 45gb bandwidth.
Great video! Didn't know that SAS drives were operating in full duplex.
Neither did I.
It was just a random fact i came across a while back when I was reading the sas specs.
I havent bought a single sata drive ever since. Sas and nvme only!! 🤘🤘
Thank you for posting this video 🎉. You have a new subscriber. Keep up the great 👍 work. This has been a very informative, & educational video..
Your support is greatly appreciated! I hope i can bring more to the table ❤️
Less common usage, you can use a sas to sata connector breakout to split the dual sas connection to a single drive. What this is useful for, is a single drive can have fully redundant data paths in a failover setup.
Nice video, well done, thank you for sharing it :)
Thanks for watching!
I run 8 1.2tb sas drives in my plex server. It does great. No issues. Even watching 2k videos. I can watch 6 2k videos without any buffer using ram transcoding on my sas drives. The first one came in the Lenovo rd350. It’s the one I run
I would like to see them completely setup. I have a couple of PC cases, a Dell H200 controller and bits and pieces I collected from businesses, going through hard rubbish(Australia), people I met via FB marketplace, etc
I do connecting and setup in part 2.
You can see the final product
Have a look!
I have a ml30 gen 9. It has the cage that is not hotswap. You have to screw each drive in and remove whole cage to remove a drive. Any backplane I find for it costs more than the server unfournatly.
Where are you looking?
Visit a local ewaste shop.
Are you located in the us or canada?
For canada, theres a big ewaste vendor/recycler: calgarywholesale, their prices are fairly decent, shipping is a kidney and a liver tho.
For the us, r/homelabsales on reddit would be your first step, then craigslist or whatever local classifieds you might have
Thanks for this video! Simple but dumb question here... I have the HP caddy on the right for the HP Proliant series (in the actual machine), and am considering putting some SAS drives in it. However, I only see where the SAS drives plug in, in the back of the cage, nowhere for power (except some holes in the back).
Does each drive need separate power inside the cage, or is that somehow automagically handled when you insert a drive?
Do the drives simply plug into the SAS ports in the back, or do you need to use additional SAS cables between each port and the drive itself?
No such thing as a stupid question, especially if youre starting out.
The cages integrate power and data.
The necessary cables are usually outside the cage, and depending on the machine can be proprietary. As you said, automagically taken care of.
You could probably trace the cables from outside of the cage to where they plug into the mobo and psu.
But usually, once you plug a drive in the cage, you have both power and data.
@@TechLabUnleashed Thanks! I got a couple of these drives and I see what you mean, they snap in when you push them in all the way.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get my SAS drives working. I'm not sure I have the right drivers (I have a HP Proliant ML110 G7, running Debian 12), but also can't seem to find them either. In the utilities I just get "Error: No controllers detected."
I think it's a SAS controller, because I can see "SAS1", "SAS2", "SAS3", "SAS4" in the back, but I'm not sure if that just means the controller is SAS capable but it could be wired for just SATA anyway. Do you know if there's a way to confirm the exact model for the drivers I would need? Would it hurt to get a couple HP SATA drives to try those instead?
What controller are you running? Sas1-4 is just the placement of the drives in the cage, nothing more.
@@TechLabUnleashedcan i directly boot into this sas drives?
@jirehla-ab1671 yes, but your controller has to be set to raid mode, and the virtual disk must have “bootable” flag.
You can buy those from manufacturers that makes them such aw ICY Dock. They make Consumer Grade and Enterprise ones. I went all Enterprise for better build quality as bought the FatCage 5 Drive bay and the Military Grade Armor 2.5 four Disk mobile bay. I instaled them in my 4U Rack mount servers.
You can, the difference is the price.
Icy dock cages cost ~ 250cad before taxes.
These cost me 40$ together.
Sas also one drawback to them is yes you gets greater speeds but you also get more heat as well.
[
with faster spinning discs surely
Great video
Thanks for the visit
@@TechLabUnleashed It was helpful for the future
@kouros0 dont be afraid to check out part 2!
my plan is to get an sff (thinkcentre m720q 8400T with 32GB of ram) it can host a pcie card, an lsi 9200-8e. the os would be proxmox with a truenas vm passing through the card. would one of those cages be fine? or should I get others with sata? I've seen many cables types 8088 8087 and cables that are 808x ending with sata connectors. do I need anything else?
Great question! Depends all on how youd want to approach it.
with a 9200-8e, you wont be getting this cage, you would be looking at an external enclosure (the “e” in 9200-8e stands for external), which is bigger and more power hungry. These cages are specifically to be used with internal connections (ie 9200-8i)
if you get an 8i (which stands for internal) card, you have several options; 8087 to 8087 cable. Which lets you use a cage like the ones shown in the video
Or
8087 to 4x sata breakout, which let you use 4x sata drives, and dont require a dedicated cage.
The third option is to mcgyver it to hell,
If you already have your 9200-8e card, you can buy 8088 to 8087 cables and use a sas cage, however, you would still have to figure out how youre going to power the drives.
@@TechLabUnleashed Thanks for the answer! I don't know if I understood the internal/external thing very well but I have an sff with a tiny case in which I can only fit the card so those cables would need to come out and connect to the disks. I would probably run a few disks, I'd say 4 to 8. I still need to buy the card. would the 4e/4i be ok for my small use-case?
If I understand correctly to use that cage 4i/8i it would be better and I would have one/two 808? cable that connects to another 808? on the cage, without any sata and I would need to find a way to power it up. right?
I've also seen icydocks with sata so I'm a bit evaluating which is the best choice.
ooh ok I'm starting to understand the internal ones are the 87 cables. are there similar external "cages" for the 88 cables? I'll probably get 88 to a bunch of sata and connect those to some kind of box with the psu that powers it.
Sorry for the late response! I am just now seeing your comment.
the external cages for 8088 cables are called shelves. they are basically a dumb array without any logic, just HDDs connected to a sas interface which you connect to and us as direct access to hardware. it's a bit more expensive, but you get a bigger storage pool for a decent price.
Look up HP 3PAR, DELL Powervauld MD3200 or IBM V7000
What controller card did you use?
HP hba 241
I can't see my sas drives when I boot my server.
Any help?
hey!
Give me an idea how your setup is done?
What hardware, cables? Can you upload photos to imgur or another image host? Can't give you help if I'm blind.
I got some second-hand SAS drives. Unfortunately, the run at only at 40MB/s 😢😢
How old are they? Check what protocol they are.
If its older than sas2, theyre probably not even worth the metal theyre composed of.
Look into an ewaste refurbisher and (if you are interested ofc) buy some 3-4Tb drives because theyre like the sweet spot in terms of Tb/dollar
@TechLabUnleashed They are oldish. I just removed my LSI card to try and lower my power usage....electricity is crazy expensive here in Australia. Roughly 45c per kW if I convert AUD to CAD😩
I have SAS Controller On Board, the motherboard says SAS/SATA Controller. On the other hand, I only have 1 SATA hard disk, and can't afford to buy a SAS hard disk for some reason. Can I use only the SATA to SAS Converter cable to connect my SATA hard disk to the SAS port? Will it work ? Can the server recognize the SATA Hard disk, and can I install an operating system on a system configured that way?
Hello! Thats an excellent question!!
By default, you dont need to. You just need either a breakout cable or a way to connect sff8087 to sata, like a sas cage.
Sas controllers are engineed in a way that they can control both sas and sata drives. So no extra conversion is required, however sata controllers cannot control sas drives, which is why you would need a separate controller.
Best of luck!
@@TechLabUnleashed Thanks for the information, I think with the above explanations I should now understand what to do, so now what I need - more or less - is a SAS SFF-8087 cable (36 Pin, Internal Mini-SAS) to Multi lane SATA cable (let say 4x latching SATA connectors), am I right?
@fx5492 yessir! You got it!
thank you very much,@@TechLabUnleashed. You help me a lot.
If you have the chance to sub, please do! Every unit helps!!
Any of these SAS cages compatible out of the box with an ATX PSU? without having to cut cables?
Excellent question!
The HP gen6/7 sas cages require only 2 molex so, if thats what you consider out of the box, then sure.
But generally speaking, this type of hardware is not designed to be for consumers.
@@TechLabUnleashed Could have sworn they have some 2x5 white power connectors, and were 6Gbs only (got some DL360/DL380 G6/G7 in a data center)
That’s a good suggestion, but we’re not talking about rackmount servers. We’re talking about tower servers. The cage that I picked up and salvaged was from a tower server and not rackmount. Rack mounts are more proprietary and they don’t have cages readily accessible that can be converted to end user
Is there a E-waste source for these?
E waste and refurb. The systems theyre found in are usually so old theyre only e waste.
Ebay, kijiji and craigslist, r/homelabsales on reddit, local e waste company (search on google)
just buy an msa60 or msa70 sold one not long ago for £75. Thats a 25 bay sas connected 2u unit.
This was meant as an addition inside a desktop tower (with some modification).
Its not always someone who explicitly wants 25 additional drives.
4 drives like this can be sufficient, especially if you put it up in raid 5/6, its still a significant increase in space available on your desktop/workstation.
Thank for showing the cages. I don't think there is really an easy way to explain most of this. I will say, you didn't mention active cooling (fans) which is a big issue for hard drives. Maybe you discuss heat and cooling in your second video.
Thats an excellent point to bring up, sadly I did not discuss cooling at all.
@@TechLabUnleashedso in order to boot into the sas drive, what would i need?
Using a consumer mobo
You need a raid capable Sas controller; create a virtual drive and set the bootable flag for the volume.
@@TechLabUnleashed u dont mean virtual drive for a VM right?
I am refering to booting into the sas drive at the host level not at a VM
@jirehla-ab1671 no, not for a VM.
When you create a raid volume, its also called a virtual drive.