Hello,

I've recently purchased a Dell 2950 and a Dell 2900, second hand. One server came with SAS drives, the other with SATA drives + interposers, all in the same 3.5" caddies.

There was some conflicting information around on the forum as to whether I needed interposers or a certain type of caddy to use SATA drives with a SATA/SAS backplane, so I had an experiment.

It appears that I'm able to mount a SATA drive in the SAS/uSATA caddy, lining it up to the SAS mounting holes and plug it in without an interposer...and it works. OS installed fine and data going to/from the discs happily.

Are the interposers that came with the server unnecessary? (They seem to be original according to the service tag.) There's quite a bit of electronics to an interposer, it's not just a pin converter or something simple, there's work gone into it - what are they for?

Cheers,
Chris