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Poweredge 2900 with 4 SATA drives and I want to add two SAS drives
Hi guys
I bought a Poweredge 2900 from Dell outlet with 4 SATA drives (250GB). I want to add two SAS drives to this server to run the OS on. Can someone please tell me what Caddy to use? I see many on this web and think that this one will work.. Will it work? And I am completely confused on the Interposer thing. Do i need a interposer? Do i need it for the SAS drives i am putting in the system or for the 4 SATA already in the system. The system has a PERC 6/i Integrated Controller Card already installed. And i plan to run the two SAS drives in RAID 1 for the operating system and the 4 SATA drives in Raid 5 for the applications.
Would really appreciate some help on this one.
Thank you.
Dev Mgr
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4 Operator
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July 14th, 2009 20:00
I've seen in a couple of posts that Dell doesn't support mixing SAS and SATA drives.
I think the reason is that SAS drives want to run dual-channel, but SATA drives cannot do this natively. The interposer board allows SATA drives to communicate as if they are dual channel. This is a requirement for the MD3000/MD3000i (these use 2 raid controllers and both controllers need to be able to talk to every single drive, so dual channel communication has to be possible for all drives) for sure, but I think that to mix SAS and SATA drives you may need the interposer boards for the SATA drives so that all drives can communicate using both channels.
grm139
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July 22nd, 2009 09:00
You do NOT need the interposers for those 250GB SATA HDDs when connected to the server backplane.
The SAS HDDs never need interposers.
SAS and SATA HDDs can be mixed on the same controller but not on the same RAID volume.
The caddy should come with the HDD when you order from Dell.