Hello folks. I've ordered a Dell Precision 7400 which should have arrived today. It has a 146Gb SAS drive. I got a 300Gb SAS drive off eBay last night. This is the first time in a long time I bought rather than built a PC and I have no idea about SAS. Is the Dell likely to have additional connections inside for more hard drives or do I need to order more cables. If I do need to order more cables what do I need?

If a motherboard manufacturer has gone through the effort to lay SAS ports down on the board you will almost certainly have 6+ SAS/SATA ports.

Don't forget that the sas spec dictates that SAS can tunnel SATA over it (and it works) so you should be able to run any fairly modern SATA II (3Gb/s) driver on a SAS system. This gives you the fast storage on SAS and the slower cheaper storage on SATA.

Also, depending on how little you paid, I'd be quite dubious about 300GB SAS drives appearing on ebay already. Mainly because I know the bulk price of the things and the cheaper ones I can see claim to be refurbished. It's not exactly cheap to refurb a dead drive and often cheaper to to replace it, so I'd be thinking more a return that wasn't actually dead or something similar.

Potentially fine, but not something I'd want to trust critical data to unless I knew it's reason for fault and the tests it had undergone to show there was no fault.

In terms of cables, it depends if the drive takes it's power via an old style connector or the SAS/SATA cable. It also depends if you want to single path or dual path to the drive.

HTH

You will need SAS data and power as they are different from SATA. I use Span.com for stuff like that

You will need SAS data and power as they are different from SATA. I use Span.com for stuff like that

No they are not.

SATA and SATA are pin compatible as all a dual connectivity SAS cable is is two SATA cables oriented in different ways.

The power connectors are the same too.

No they are not.

SATA and SATA are pin compatible as all a dual connectivity SAS cable is is two SATA cables oriented in different ways.

The power connectors are the same too.

However, SAS doesn't have the kink in it. You can fit a SAS Cable cable to a SAS and SATA drive but not the other way round due to the fact a SAS drive doesn't have a gap in the middle

I was talking about putting SATA onto SAS so in that case you are correct.

Of course if they put multilane mini sas internal on the motherboard then you end up with expensive cables required too.

Thanks all. Found I needed an interposer thing from Dell, got one ordered. The HDD I got from eBay was taken from a Dell system and the guy can't get it to work with his mobo. If it doesn't work he says he's happy to take it back. So far I'm impressed with the Dell, nice and fast if not slightly larger than what I'm used to.