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First post, by sgraffite

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I have a dual Pentium III 1.266GHz system (HP Server tc3100) that has a five drive SCA backplane. Currently it has two 36GB SCSI drives in it, but I was thinking of replacing them with something quieter.

I also have an Sil3114 PCI card that I could flash and use a SATA drive and mount that in the case somewhere (there are no other mount points for drives unless I use an adapter for a 5.25" bay). I still need to flash the firmware it so it doesn't require RAID to function. Currently trying JBOD it acts like it can't see the drives. It does kind of seem like a waste to not use the SCA slots, but I have plenty of SATA drives that are not noisy.

Locally on Craigslist someone is selling some Seagate ST936701SS SAS drives for $8 each. Would it be possible to use these in the SCA slots? I don't have any experience with SAS. I'd assume these would be quieter as they are smaller, but there's a chance they would not be.

I have Ubuntu 14.04 server installed on it currently for use as a for fun web server if that matters.

Thoughts?

Reply 2 of 2, by konc

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SATA drives can be connected to SAS backplanes, but not on SCA. Althouth both are SCSI flavors, SCA is much older and not aware of SATA drives.
The same applies for SAS drives, they can't be connected to a SCA backplane.

As for the noise... well, I don't know the levels of your current HDDs, but even SAS drives are nowhere near consumer SATA drives. They might be more quiet than older SCSI monsters, but still don't expect levels of a laptop's HDD just because they come out in 2.5" too.

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