Straight Answer On Dell PERC 5/i

[CRAIG2432]

Please can someone shed some light on my problem. How many SATA II HD can I connect to a PERC 5/i RAID card.

I would like to have 2x 80 GIG SATA II for OS Raid 1
Also 3x 160 GIG SATA II that the customer already has will encrypted data ( No Raid on any of these 3)

I have justr read the Dell spec for the card and it says.

The PERC 5/i has internal SAS connectors in which 4 SAS ports are aggregated to yield a wide port with a bandwidth capacity of 12.0Gbps (1,200 MB/sec).

But my Dell account manager says I will have no problems connecting all 5 of my drives, and others if I wihs.

Help Please someone?

 

[fs483]

Hmm, not sure if SAS and SATA are the same. SATA drives are 3.5" while SAS are 2.5" I believe. I just started using SAS drives for a few new HP servers that we purchased. I've built many computers (workstations) using SATA drives and they are completely different.

 

[jkupski]

Depends on the server, not the raid card.

 

[jkupski]

addendum to the above: yes, the raid card is a factor--however, your effective limit is going to be the number of drive bays in the system.

 

[PaulGillespie]

I have a PE1900 with Perc 5i card. Has 2 for os and 3 in raid 5. Also have space for 1 more drive on card and in server.

 

[pie8ter]

SAS and SATA are based on different architectures. SAS stands for Serial Attached SCSI and SATA stands for Serial ATA. The keyword here is 'serial'. SATA is based on IDE technology and SATA is SCSI.

PATA = Parallel ATA => older hard drives, CD/DVD drives, etc.
SATA = Serial ATA => new hard drives

P-SCSI = Parallel SCSI (generally known as SCSI) => SCSI hard drives, SCSI tape drives
SAS = Serial SCSI => newer version of SCSI drives.

 

[w33mhz]

You will be fine. The SAS and SATA achitectures are different like pi8ter stated. But SAS has support for SATA drives, you can add alot of SATAs to a SAS controller.

 

[bigwigtom]

Hi CRAIG2432,
I own a Perc 5i and you can connect up to 8 SATA hard drives to it. It has 2 x SFF8484 connectors. These are aggregate connectors bunching 4xSAS ports onto one physical connector.

Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

SAS is backwards compatible with SATA. You can configure the PERC to any configuration of RAID you desire. 2xRAID1 and 3xJBOD would work no problem.

You main issue is going to be motherboard compatibility. The Perc5i is incompatible with MOST PCI-Express motherboards. Read this:

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s=9dfb1558104277934f1a7914980be035&t=84882&page=2

...have fun