Can you mix SAS and SATA drives in the same RAID6 Array?

[jbrukardt]

Controller is an Areca 1883ix,-24 no sas expanders, connected to a norco 4220 passive backplane chassis.

Current array is a 16x 4TB sata raid6, but im starting to lose some drives, and the SAS drives are just so much cheaper.

 

[Stonent]

I have no experience with that specific device, but on my LSI card installed in my Cisco UCS C210 series server, I started with SATA laptop drives and one by one would mark them as offline and plop in a 600GB SAS 10k drive, and let it build while in the LSI BIOS. I think I have one of the older cards but not the one that has the 2TB size limitation.

 

[jbrukardt]

Good news! unlike the dells, it looks like you can in fact do this.

Got this reply from Areca support super quick.

Dear Sir/Madam,
sure, it is supported.

Best Regards,

Kevin Wang

 

[Spartacus]

I'm surprised, none of the OEM hosts I've worked with will even allow you to select SAS and SATA together much less make an array.
I'd be interested to know if you accomplish this successfully.

 

[i386]

I'm surprised, none of the OEM hosts I've worked with will even allow you to select SAS and SATA together much less make an array.

Because they don't want to support such a system
Sas and sata devices can handle errors/problems differently (eg: time before reporting a failure to the raid controller) which can result in a corrupt/degraded array.

 

[kapone]

Whether you can or not is a good question. Whether you should is an even better question.

 

[John Piontkowski]

make sure you understand how the Areca is really handling SATA drives in a mixed SAS array. The older AReca I have worked with could do it, but the SATA drives were SLOW, it was intended for emergency use only until a proper matching SAS drive could be installed.