SAS drives - new to me

[mandg]

Our shop runs several hundred HP servers with predominantly SCSI drives. I'm being told by our reseller that HP is switching to SAS drives and I'm new to this technology. I understand that SAS is an extension of the SCSI technology but I can't find clear information on interoperability.

My main concern is, what would happen if I swapped all of our SCSI drives out for SAS drives? Would the controller be SAS aware and run at the higher speeds or would I need to upgrade the controller bios (or something like that)?

Thanks in advance for any calrification.

[Sameer_Nirmal]

Take a look at this link, you will get all technical details of the SAS technology.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/serial/index.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

[e4services · Accepted solution]

Well, if you haven't figured it out by now, the SAS is Serial Attached SCSI, like serial ATA, the communication to the drive is serial not parallel like your current servers. The bus is what HP has gone to in there hot swap configurations. Your current servers would not support the new SAS drives because the connects are different as well as the protocol, only any new servers would come that way, so not to worry, you still owuld need the standard hot swap SCSIs for the existing servers.

[mandg]

Thank you for the details - that straightened me out. Athough I was hoping for some sort of backward-compatibility solution as I'm now looking at growing my blade server enclosures with a mix of servers with some SAS and others with the SCSI drives. No big deal I guess...

Thanks again.