Some controllers allow to flash drive firmware with built-in utilities (adaptec does for sure), but anyway – it’s not safe, especially for arrays. Even utilities can do that – I won’t. It’s better to update drives one-by-one and rebuild them. There is a risk that drives might not work after firmware flash and in case … Read more
My two cents: If you are concerned about the edge case failures that may occur with SATA hardware (specifically, lousy SATA controllers), spend the money on real SAS disks. These cards do what they say on the tin: They translate SAS (SCSI) commands to SATA commands, and even implement a few themselves (like power- and … Read more
You can use either. Much of what’s displayed depends on your controller and disks. I use SAS controllers and SAS disks (with SATA SSDs, in some cases), but you’re free to use whatever you wish for your zpool drive identification. The reason you see ata and SCSI is the SCSI emulation layer in Linux here. … Read more
SATA2 disks should be compatible with the Smart Array P400i that comes with your server (or any other SAS controller, for the matter), although probably not with stellar performance as others have noted. But keep in mind that not all SATA disks are suitable for use with RAID because of the infamous Time-Limited Error Recovery … Read more
It’s a case of math. I/O-per-second is determined by the following calculation: Random I/O = 1000/ (average latency + seek time) For a 7.2K RPM drive, a seek-time of 8.5ms and latency of 4.16 gives an IOPS number of 78. For a 15K RPM drive, a seek-time of 2.6ms and latency of 2.0ms gives an … Read more
Normally nothing has changed between the cables between SATA I,II and III. From the official SATA-IO document: The same cables and connectors used for current SATA implementations can be used to connect SATA 6Gb/s devices. SATA-IO recommends utilizing quality components to ensure data integrity and robust operation at the fast 6Gb/s transfer rate. Cables already … Read more
It works. SATA discs are compatible with SAS. I have tons of them in SAS backplanes. Work like a charm.
That’s almost exactly 4000 seconds, within the accuracy of a cheap oscillator. This means that probably, something in the SATA drive or SATA controller firmware does this automatically. The reason for that could be anything, basically. For example, the drive firmware resetting every 4000s when some component-checking subroutine fails. The SATA controller firmware resetting every … Read more
Likely your best bet is a hardware problem somewhere between your disks and up to and including your sas raid controller. I recommend trying: Run any diagnostic tools from the vendor/s if they are available Check/re-seat/replace cables strip out hardware components and swap out hardware in the chain that connects the disks to your raid … Read more
Generally speaking, in direct answer to your question, I am not aware of any major brands of SATA drives that the drive itself has had bugs relative to proper operation with write caching enabled. That is, from a drive perspective only, the drive does what it is supposed to do from a caching perspective. I … Read more