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Mistakenly bought a SAS Drive (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hello,

Bought a spare super cheap used 3TB drive a year ago, and just figured out it's not a SATA but a SAS drive.

How fucked am I? What can I do more than using it as a paperweight?

Cheers!

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

This is all assuming it's a spinning disk and not an SSD, so ignore me if that's the case:

Given SAS drives are usually used in data centre storage array applications and 3TB disks have been kinda small for that use case for a fair while, there's a fairly high chance it was in heavy use for a good number of years. I'd bet it's probably well on its way to being a paperweight regardless of your connectivity situation.

If you do get it hooked up, don't store anything on it you wouldn't be okay losing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yep spinning rust.

Wanted a scratch disk to aggregate all my sensitive information thats scattered and duplicated on smaller disks and thumb drives. Would probably keep it as an ultimate backup too (I got a real backup).

My thinking was that usually those disks are swapped out after 5 years when failure rates starts to creep up, but there's still is some life left, largely enough for some fun.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

SMART will tell you how many hours it's been running

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

If I get it up and running ^^ !

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yust buy a SAS controller (with cables), they are used pretty cheap.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

On ebay.fr they are like the price of the drive (around 25€ with shipping) :-(

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Why buy a used drive? Save $12? F that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't know where you live but I got the drive for 30€ including shipping, a new drive is over 100€...

[+] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (6 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

Not if you have a proper backup plan.

I have about 200ish TB or about 24 drives and 3 of them failed all are used. I have a solid backup plan so no issues with failing drives. Saves me roughly 100-200 a drive.

New drives have infant mortality as well. An inverse bell curve would be the distribution.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Look, i'm buying two hard drives no matter what to anticipate a drive failure. In that case, if i'm anticipating a failure anyway, might as well buy them second-hand and, yes, save a ton of money.

The key is to look for a CrystalDiskInfo screenshot in the ad, which is indicative of a serious seller and also lets you know the drive's condition. If you buy from a professional, you may get a warranty.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I learned the hard way when the cheap PSU blew up and took with it the mobo, my drive and my backup drive. That was the year 2000 or 2001.

Since then I do have a good backup strategy (with most important stuff on amazon glacier).

So you learned the hard way losing your porn stash 😉 ?

Jk, and the drive is not for important stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

PSU you is the other part you don't want to cheap out on... Guess you got two lessons in one there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah, for sure. To be totally fair I probably got even more lessons out of it as I upgraded my SOs Duron 650 to an Athlon (so new mobo) and that was what blew up the chep PSU I guess...

Usually I now go 750-900w platinum just because it's so nice when the fan doesn't start before 400 watts (and it heats less ofc).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

bullshit. drives should be backed up if the data is important which makes refurb and used drives perfectly acceptable. raid and good backups exists for a reason and don't leave you to rely on one single drive to live forever.

if you're buying large drives and not using a system with raid functionality, you're setting yourself up for failure, new drive or not. no crying you were warned.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

I've gotten 3 drives from serverpartdeals, an 18 and a pair of 22s. They were $220, about half price.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

You can get a SAS USB external enclosure but they're in the $100 range, probably not worth it for 3TB.

For internal use, you can get a used PCIe SAS Host Bus Adapter fairly cheap BUT you need to do some research. Before you buy one you should confirm that there is a driver for the OS that you are using and that it is supported on your processor/socket/chipset. These cards are server hardware - many of them are not supported by Windows and/or are not compatible with consumer motherboards & CPUs.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Buy a cheap (used?) SAS controller. No big deal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

On ebay.fr they are like the price of the drive (around 25€ with shipping) :-(

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Congrats on the new paper weight!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Ha ha thanks I guess 😁

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I've seen SAS-SATA adapters for sale online. I got a 120GB used SAS, and it's cheaper to buy another drive than to order the adapter.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

You can get a used sas controller for cheap in most cases. Or try your luck with the generic stuff on Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Haven't tried it myself, but there is cheap converters available on AliExpress:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EwYtdeV

Might be worth it to avoid using it as a paperweight?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The link in Sanctus post says its SAS to SATA but the other way around doesn't work for cheap converters 😞

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

sorry if I misunderstood, but wasn't his drive sas, and he needed to go to sata connections? this does that.

sas hdd => sata controller connetions

the converter is not the culprit, the drive needs a sata logo on the label for it to work the other way, which is mentioned on the sales page.

if the drive had that logo or not is not mentioned as far as I can see

(edit, thought it was OP replying at first, so changed that, and added requirements for the adapter)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's exactly what I'd like to find, but you cannot, it seems, connect a SAS disk to a SATA slot on the mobo, only the other way around, with this adapter.

The comments also seems to say exactly that (you have to put 4 or 5 stars to comment, so that's a useless measure, gotta read those translated comments).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

you can, if you read my edited post, as long as the SATA logo is present on the label of the sas drive

as mentioned in the description of the product

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

Thank you!

Mine is suspiciously looking like yours 😁 but Dell, and without the sticker...

Is it just a Dell rebranded Seagate? I mean Dell doesn't make drives right? And the serial takes me right to segate drives who are compatible s-ata.

Guess I'll gamble a couple of € to see 😁

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Dell drives are rebranded Seagates, however the firmware is slightly modified so the bios recognizes it as a Dell branded drive. Openmanage will throw an error if you use a different drive (though aside from that everything will work fine)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks! Crossing my fingers 😁

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

there is cheap controllers as well btw:

https://a.aliexpress.com/_ExfUSap

lots of cheap electronics for all your needs over there :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Ha ha yes my home is filled with unsuspectedly good stuff from aliexpress 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What you do is to look on the local used hardware sites, search for server, fet a cheap one with SAS interfaces, and now you have the start of a homelab.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Good idea, but what am I going to do with my thinkcentres 😁

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Use them as clients in your homelab?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Connot have too many computers!