Perc5/i with SATA disks

[Patrick_Boyd at Dell.com]

To clarify, the "little chip" you are talking about is called an
interposer. It is only needed if the drive is in an external enclosure.
(The SATA signal strength isn't as high as SAS so all this does is
amplify the signal basically). The interposer isn't need if the SATA
drive is in a backplane physically attached to the server. 



-----Original Message-----
From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com
[mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Matthew
Schumacher
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2006 5:16 PM
To: Ling C. Ho
Cc: linux-poweredge-Lists
Subject: Re: Perc5/i with SATA disks

Ling C. Ho wrote:
> 
> Is it the megaraid_sas driver that it is using? May I ask what Linux 
> distribution you are using?
> 
> By the way this is where I found saying Sata is not supported.
> http://www.scsistuff.com/pe2950.html  (notes section, #6)
> 
> Thanks a lot.
> ...
> ling

The controller doesn't support SATA, it's a SAS controller, but the SATA
drives that come from dell have a little card on the back of the mount
that convert SATA<->SAS.  So the controller thinks it's talking to SAS
drives and the drives think they are talking to a SATA controller.
Overall it's a pretty good idea since dell can offer one controller for
both.

I forget the name of the chip that does the conversion but they are
pretty popular and are used in many SATA JBODs that connect to SAS
controllers.

On my 1950 system, disk performance is pretty decent....

schu

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