Mix SAS and SATA on Areca (VMWare ESX4i)

Quote:

Originally Posted by cdrive

Hi All

I am in the process of evaluating Open-E in order to move from an Openfiler setup. Openfiler and IET has been a disaster with my VMWare ESX4i cluster.

I want to make sure that this time I follow the best practices; does anyone have experience mixing SAS and SATA disks on the same controller (Areca) under OE? I have mixed (with luck) the two interfaces on an enterprise Dell/EMC SAN but want to make sure that it's kosher on the EO platform.

Any thoughts? Best practices? Warnings? Experiences with ESX4i and SCST backend?

Cheers and TIA
Dave

Although this is a little bit old I would like to answer this in case anyone needs to know. It´s no problem to mix SAS and SAN on the Areca Controller, although I would prefer to do this on separate RAID Sets. E.g. we use 4 2 gig SATA drives in Raid Set 2 as a backup and archiv Volume plus 6 SAS drives in Raid Set 1 as a production Volume.

For production we would always choose SAS drives (espacially in Vsphere setups), because there is a huge difference in lantency if you access them with several VM´s. There are not many reasons for SATA drives any more, because Nearline SAS drives are only 10-20% more expansive than 24*7 SATA drives. SATA is only interesting for big backups and archives....