Mixing SAS and SATA drives on Dell R510 with H700

 

TheFlash1932 has basically answered the >2tb drive question in the following post, and other posts.....

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/956/p/19467661/20189879.aspx

As far as the affect of having slower SATA drives (in a separate array)  along with assuming faster SAS drives (in a separate array).... Never ran a benchmark on such a system, but the SATA array will definitely be slower, particularly under any decent load. If both arrays are under load at the same time, the fact the SATA controller is consuming more time to process I/O, thus more raid controller and system cycles, it has to degrade overall disk subsystem performance to a degree. Likely very little performance loss due to added overhead unless both arrays are under a heavy load, but due to SATA's slower performance you will see a performance difference for both reads and writes on  the TB array or if a program runs from the SAS array accessing data on the SATA array.

heavy load=the array drives LED are blazing away with milliseconds between the blips, on a constant basis; you see this with many users accessing at once or multiple searches at one time. 

 

Hello Tony

Can I add 6 - 3 TB SATA drives?  Not sure if the H700 can handle > 2 TB as will as having mix hardware (SAS and SATA together).

Yes, the H700 supports 3TB drives.
Yes, you can mix SAS and SATA on the same controller, you just can't mix them within the same RAID array.

If it is possible, would be impact on R/W speed be substantial?

SAS and SATA are point to point connections. The addition of new hard drives should have no impact on the performance of your other array. The only way it would impact the other drives would be if write cache on the controller gets full. Under normal conditions this will not happen.

Thanks