ThinkServer Towers

[#1]

I'm fully aware of the problems of mixing SATA and SAS drives, however does anyone know or have experience of mixing different SAS drives with different RPM's?  Doing a Google search did not bring up anything so I thought I would turn here.

Plans are to place OS on three 73GB SAS (15K rpm) drives (IBM drives) in Raid 1E, then using Seagate 750GB or 1TB SAS drives in Raid 10 (they are 7200 rpm drives).

This set up is on a TD100x, 2 CPU, 16GB system.   (and yes we need the protected storage for a VERY large database.)

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

The 7200 rpm drives:  http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/barracuda_es/

[#2 · Accepted solution]

i've been running a combination of 15K and 7200 RPM SAS drives in my thinkstation for 1.5 years without a single issue.   one drive is a 2.5" 15K RPM savvio (73.4GB), two are 3.5" 15K RPM cheetahs (300GB), and two are 3.5" 7200 RPM barracudas (1TB).

while it's not recommended to mix drive speeds due to chassis harmonics, the drives in thinkstations and thinkservers are very well isolated from vibration using elastomer mounts.

my personal opinion is that i wouldn't worry about it.

[#3]

Erik,

Thanks for the information.  Very helpful!

[#4]

Since Monday Lenovo supports on WS and servers also mixing SAS and SATA disks. Each just have to be in deifferent array. Mixing different speeds not supported inside one array.

So you can use eg.

2x146GB SAS 15k RAID 1 for OS

3x500GB SATA 7.2k RAID 5 for data

but you cannot have eg. RAID 5 with 2x146GB SAS 15k + 1x146GB 10k.

If mixing individual drives - you can put inside whatever is supported on backplane.