Products Tape Libraries, Tape Drives, and Storage Media

Can An SAS Tape Drive Connect to a Dell PERC 6i SAS RAID Controller?

Question:
We a new Dell PowerEdge with a PERC 6i Integrated SAS RAID controller. We also utilize a tape drive connected U320 LVD to an internal Adaptec PCI-X SCSI Card. We need to upgrade the tape drive to a larger unit and we're considering an SAS unit. Can it be directly connected to the PERC 6i unit and direct it to show as a tape drive in Windows Server 2003?

Answer:
Tape drives do not traditionally work on RAID adapters, which are optimized for disk.   So, you will need a separate SAS adapter for the new drive.  We have an Dell PERC 5/E we use for testing external SAS tape drives that works very well.  We have also noticed that SAS LTO-4's perform faster than their SCSI and 2Gb FC counterparts, so for stand-alone drives, SAS is definitely the way to go.  Hopefully your server has PCI Express slots, as non-RAID SAS adapters are fairly rare in the PCI-X varieties.

March 24, 2009 at 11:58 AM