Will a dual port expander work with SATA drives?

[Michael Pasqualone]

I've been Googlin' for hours and can't seem to get a simple yes/no answer to what I hope is a simple question.

I'm looking to purchase a SC216BE2C-R920WB Chassis with dual port SAS expander, capable of redundancy. My question in short is, will it work with SATA drives?

Initially, I want to use 2x HBA's and 24x SATA drives for testing/development and eventually will replace them with SAS drives down the path when budget allows. If it does work, I realise the redundancy capabilities won't work - but, will it function at all with SATA drives?

 

[MiniKnight]

I think for this you need dual ported SAS drives.

Maybe get these: Smart Storage SanDisk Optimus 920GB Enterprise SSD SAS 2 5" TXA2D2 New | eBay and Smart Storage SanDisk Optimus 920GB Enterprise SSD SAS 2 5" TXA2D2 New | eBay and New Smart Storage SanDisk HP 3PAR Optimus TXA2D20920GA60HP 920GB SAS SSD | eBay and you'd fill up the chassis with about 20TB of storage at $0.50/GB or there abouts. You'll have SAS drives from the start and not have to worry about SATA v. SAS and not have to replace everything. Those drives had good write endurance too. Not like SATA is much cheaper than those drives.

 

[Michael Pasqualone]

The drives have already been purchased and we don't currently have the budget to get the SAS drives during development. So I was wondering if we can get the chassis to begin with, and then test it out before getting approval to upgrade and rebuild to SAS drives.

 

[neo]

Supermicro has very prompt and knowledgable support staff. support@supermicro.com