Refurbished SAS Hard Drives

SAS drives by spindle speed

Spindle speed decides what a SAS hard drive is for. Seagate's datasheets show the trade-off: 2.0 ms average latency for its 15K Exos 15E900, 2.9 ms for its 10K Exos 10E2400 and 4.16 ms for its 7.2K Exos 7E8, while the largest model in each family grows from 900GB to 2.4TB to 8TB.

Each class also has its own page: 15,000 RPM SAS drives, 10,000 RPM SAS drives and nearline SAS (NL-SAS) drives.

Servers and controllers that run SAS

A SAS drive needs a SAS controller. Seagate's guidance runs one way: a SATA drive can go on a SAS controller, but a SAS drive cannot go on a SATA controller. Dell lists 12Gb/s SAS and 6Gb/s SATA drives for the PowerEdge R740 and R740xd behind PERC controllers such as the H730P and H740P, or the non-RAID HBA330, and HPE's DL380 Gen10 QuickSpecs class SAS drives as Enterprise at 10K and 15K and Midline at 7.2K. Some listings are for the bare drive and say so; check the tray against your chassis. Interface trade-offs are in our SAS vs SATA guide, and array layouts in our RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10 comparison.

Every SAS drive comes with an Enterasource warranty, the length given on each listing. Controllers for these drives are listed under SAS HBAs and server RAID controllers. Browse every interface on server hard drives, or compare SATA hard drives.

Common question

What is a SAS drive?

A SAS drive is a hard drive or SSD that uses Serial Attached SCSI, the serial interface that carries SCSI commands at 3, 6 or 12 Gb/s. A SAS hard drive has two independent ports, each with its own SAS address, so a server can reach it over two paths, and Seagate's Exos 15E900 manual lets each port run at its own link rate. SAS connectors and cabling also accept SATA drives, but a SAS drive cannot run on a SATA-only controller, so it pairs with a SAS HBA or a SAS RAID controller such as a Dell PERC.