Which SAS controller do I need?

[Tekunda]

I decided to step up from U320 to SAS after I was able to win a pretty decent Seagate Cheattah SAS drive at Ebay.

Since I believe Adaptec is the only manufacturer so far to offer Vista drivers, I guess it will be one of their controllers.
Which card would you suggest for a modest one drive SAS system? (Maybe I will step up to a RAID 0 system in the future)

Oh, and since most cards do not come with cables and I have never used SAS drives before, what cable do I need to connect drive and controller?

PS

In order to build a Raid 0 system, do the two drives have to be identical - by the same manufacturer - or is it sufficient if they have the same capacity?

 

[MaxBurn]

I believe you use standard SATA cables. The physical interface is the same, you can even use SATA drives on a SAS controller.

To put together drives in RAID it is preferred to have the same capacity, model and firmware drives. At a minimum same model. I think you would expect some strange things to happen when mixing drives. There was a thread recently here on mixing drives in RAID, try to look that up.

 

[sechs]

Most HBAs that I've seen come with x4 or x8 connectors and require fan cables. You can get both SATA-style ends and SAS-style ends with data+power, but the SATA-style connectors will not work directly on a SAS drive.

Personally, I'd suggest going with LSI. Vista should have the standard MPT driver for the more recent LSI SCSI and SAS cards.

 

[Tekunda]

I checked LSI, they appear to have Vista 64 drive support only. I am running Vista 32. Any idea if Vista 64 drivers run under Vista 32?

 

[ddrueding]

I checked LSI, they appear to have Vista 64 drive support only. I am running Vista 32. Any idea if Vista 64 drivers run under Vista 32?

No. They won't.

 

[MaxBurn]

I am obviously showing my ignorance above about these matters but what about using the XP/2003 x86 driver under vista x86? I was able to do that with one or two devices in my very brief exploration of Vista.

 

[sechs]

I checked LSI, they appear to have Vista 64 drive support only.

Are you saying that Vista doesn't come with appropriate drivers?

 

[CougTek]

There's something appropriate coming with Vista?

 

[sechs]

Well no. Let me rephrase:
Are you saying that Vista doesn't come with acceptable drivers?

 

[Bozo]

No, Vista is not acceptable.

Bozo :joker: