I'm sure the backplane can handle either SAS or SATA drives, but the carrier you get for the drives will only support SAS drives. If you were to buy a MD1000, you'd see on the EMM "ONLY SAS DRIVES SUPPORTED".
Message Edited by Storagetalk on 05-22-200607:18 AM
At present Sata is not supported on the MD1000. Although sata disks will fit in the SAS carriers and any 9th gen server disk carrier, they will sit proud of the enclosure a bit.
There will have to be a firmware and management software release to support sata. Probably once the technology has matured a bit and teething problems are sorted.
There is actually an issue that SATA signal strength is not upto SAS specs so they have to address that problem. I'm not entirely sure how they are going to do it but I understand that SAS/SATA mixed support is comming soon.
To address customers' requirements for excellent storage optimization, Dell is expanding disk drive technology on PowerVaultTM MD1000 DAS systems to include support for Serial ATA (SATA) II disk drives. This technology is available in addition to previously announced configurations supporting 3.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives.
and
PowerVault MD1000 with SATA II disk drives
Supports key customer applications including tiered storage, streaming media and disk-based backup and recovery
Affordable option for customers needing to store a large amount of data on inexpensive disk storage
From this information It look as if SATA drives should be available for the MD1000 sometime soon.
The MD1000 doesn't come with a sata to sas bridge, so a dongle or interposer board (bridge) will be fitted onto the sata drive which will then plug into the array. The drive carriers have two sets of mounting holes, one for SAS and one for SATA. The sata holes are further back to take in the board.
At present there are only laptop 2.5 in sata drives which are not robust enough for server enviroments. When better drives arrive they wil appear in servers and storage.
SATA II disks are now supported on the MD1000 since 6/30 with 250GB and 500GB sizes available. SATA II disks use an "interposer" card which provides the drive and signaling for SAS subsystem compatibility.
Storagetalk
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Posted May 22nd, 2006 11:00
Per the Dell Website:
Drive Bays
Holds up to 15 SAS drives
Message Edited by Storagetalk on 05-22-200607:18 AM