Production-grade 1.8" to 2.5" SAS adapters?

[sno.cn]

I have a bunch of 1.8" 400GB Seagate 1200 SSDs, and I want to use them in some production servers. They accept 5v, so I'd prefer to stay away from adapters with voltage regulators. I've tried several of the adapters listed on Amazon and eBay, and the Lenovo passthrough adapter that I've seen recommended before.

My issue is everything I've found is either too cheaply-made to consider for production use, or doesn't work with any drive cages.

Does anyone have a go-to adapter in a standard 2.5" form factor, with standard 2.5" screw holes, no VR, with full SAS passthrough? Something that's not fully enclosed would be best, so I don't have to worry about heat dissipation too.

 

[T_Minus]

I couldn't find any when I scored some 400GB S3700s and sold them at a loss.

 

[sno.cn]

I was getting ready to replace these with something in 2.5" but I'm glad I didn't.

As it turns out, the Lenovo adapter fits great into the 3.5" trays with 2.5" adapters from both Supermicro and Intel. For some reason I never noticed the little posts on the sides are where a normal 2.5" drive's mounting holes are. The adapters needed some trimming to fit in the Intel drive trays, but they went into the Supermicro trays as-is.

I like the Lenovo adapter because it's just passthrough, it locks the drive in securely, and leaves the top and bottom open so airflow isn't an issue...these drives run pretty warm.







Here's where I trimmed the adapter to fit in the Intel tray.




In the Intel tray. It's pretty secure, but the drive will pop out if you drop it. The easy fix for that is to not drop it.




In the Supermicro tray. The sides of the SM tray are much more rigid, so the drive stays put. I had to loosen the screw on the side of the tray to get the drive/adapter in. Then retighten the screw, and everything is very solid.

 

[TedB]

These disks ST800FM0063 have SAS3 interface I believe, however the Lenovo adapter seems to be just microSATA to SATA converter.

@sno.cn Were you able to use this converter to connect those drives as SAS3 and not just SATA ? SATA has a limitation of NCQ 32 queue depth, SAS doesn't have this limitation and therefore I believe is able to achieve better performance.

 

[sno.cn]

It's not a converter, it's just a plug adapter so there's no reason it would behave any differently than a sata breakout cable connected to a sas backplane. It's just passing the pins into a different size connector.

The only thing you lose is dual port capability, but even the 1.8" to 2.5" sas adapters I have don't actually pass PortB to the drive.