Refurbished SATA Hard Drives for Servers

SATA or SAS: what changes

SATA and SAS drives fit the same bays in many servers, but compatibility runs in one direction only. Seagate builds one of its 7,200 RPM enterprise capacity drives in both interfaces, which makes a fair comparison:

Both versions spin at 7,200 RPM with the same 4.16 ms average latency, so the decision is about ports and controllers rather than speed. When a design calls for dual-ported capacity drives, look at NL-SAS hard drives; the wider background is in our guide to SAS and SATA drive interfaces.

Enterprise SATA, nearline SAS and desktop SATA

An enterprise SATA drive is built and rated for servers that run around the clock with many drives in one chassis; a desktop SATA drive is rated for a PC. Seagate's data sheets for its 7,200 RPM enterprise capacity drives and its desktop 3.5-inch drives give the gap in numbers:

Seagate also builds rotational vibration tolerance into the enterprise drives for RAID and multi-drive systems, which is why a server bay full of spinning disks calls for the enterprise class.

Fitting SATA drives in a server

Dell lists 6Gb/s SATA alongside 12Gb/s SAS for the 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch bays of the PowerEdge R740xd, and the R750 supported-drive list runs 3.5-inch 7.2K SATA from 2TB to 18TB. HPE sells its SATA hard drives as Midline 7.2K, in small and large form factor. Confirm whether your server has LFF or SFF bays before you choose; the 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive pages show every interface side by side, and Dell PowerEdge servers are a click away.

Link rates are not a barrier: SATA negotiates down, so a 6Gb/s drive runs at 3Gb/s on an older port and Seagate's enterprise SATA drives list 6.0, 3.0 and 1.5Gb/s. Two fit details matter more. The carrier must suit your chassis, so check whether a listing ships bare and source trays from hard drive caddies and trays if needed. And a SATA drive on a SAS port stays single-ported: Seagate notes that an interposer is required when a SATA device needs dual-port or multi-host access. The controllers that run these drives are on server RAID controllers and SAS HBAs.

An Enterasource warranty covers each drive for the term its listing states. All interfaces are on server hard drives, and SAS only on SAS hard drives.

SATA hard drive questions

Will any SATA hard drive work in my server?

Most servers will run a SATA drive of the right size in their SAS/SATA bays, provided three things line up: the carrier for your chassis, a controller with SATA support, which every SAS controller has, and the server maker's qualification list. Dell's PERC 10 guide, for example, supports Dell-qualified SAS and SATA drives. A desktop drive fits the bay but carries a tenth of the enterprise workload rating.

Can I put SATA drives on a SAS controller?

Yes. Seagate's guidance is that SATA drives run on SAS controllers, which carry the SATA protocol through the SAS interface, while SAS drives cannot run on SATA controllers. The drive keeps its single port, and the controller will not combine SAS and SATA drives in one virtual disk on a Dell PERC, so plan separate arrays for each interface.

Are SATA drives OK for RAID 5 or RAID 6?

They are common in capacity arrays, with one rating to weigh: Seagate specifies its enterprise SATA drives at one nonrecoverable sector per 10^15 bits read, against one per 10^16 for its 10K and 15K SAS drives. That rating, the size of each drive and the number of drives in the set shape the rebuild exposure, which our guide to rebuild risk by RAID level works through.