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T7500 sas ports question can i use them for sata drive storage?
So i was given a dell t7500 that i want to use as a desk top
It has 3 sata ports one has my os c drive one the opitic drive and
One a storage drive and is working great as a desktop
The board also has 4 sas ports which i know very little about
I Would like to use the sas ports for more sata storage drives,
Each with its own drive letter, each with diffrent stuff on them,
Is this possible to use sata drives in these sas ports for extra
Storage or should i leave the sas ports empty and get a card
With sata ports?
Thanks
B
jphughan
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September 8th, 2017 17:00
Some quick research indicates that the SAS standard mandates that SAS controllers be backward compatible with SATA 3Gb and newer disks. However, SATA controllers will NOT accept SAS drives. I know that's not what you're trying to do, but just wanted to make that clear.
And yes, as mentioned above, this is the wrong section of the forum. :)
the13bats
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September 8th, 2017 17:00
Posted in wrong section modarator please help and move thread, thanks
the13bats
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September 8th, 2017 18:00
So i can or cannot do what i desire to do?
jphughan
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September 8th, 2017 23:00
As long as the SATA drives you want to use support 3Gb/s or faster, then yes you can connect them to SAS ports. You would NOT be able to take the SAS drives currently in your T7500 and connect them to SATA ports, however -- just in case you might ever want to do that in order to recover data from them in some other system, for example.
the13bats
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September 8th, 2017 23:00
Thank you, a few more questions,
To explain, the tower came with no hdds at all the fellow kept them
I have like many who play around with old computers lots of old sata drives
When i plug the sata drives into sas ports each will get a drive letter
And work as if plugged into sata ports?
Many thanks
jphughan
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September 8th, 2017 23:00
The drives will work the same as if you connected them to SATA ports. In terms of drive letters, that depends on what's on the drives and whether they're running through a RAID controller. For simplicity, I'll assume that there's either no RAID controller, or there is and you're just not going to put them into a RAID array.
Drive letters are assigned to partitions, not drives. So for each drive you install, if it's not initialized (i.e. it has no partitions on it), you would have to initialize it first, then you would create one or more partitions on the drive, and a drive letter would then be assigned to each partition. Or you might find that the drive already has one or more partitions set up, in which case each partition would automatically be assigned a drive letter. You would then have to decide whether you wish to keep the existing partition layout and file system (FAT32 vs NTFS, for example) or whether you instead want to erase the drive and set it up from scratch. The Disk Management utility in Windows would help you do all of this.