Toshiba MG03SCA200 2TBSAS HDD for a Windows 7 boot drive

[loninapleton]

Hello,

I may have jumped at the wrong deal on Ebay for a Toshiba MG03SCA200 2TB 7200RPM SAS 6Gb/s 64MB 3.5" HDD SAS drive for use as a standard backup boot drive.

Are there known problems with using an SAS for Windows 7 backup on AMD CPUs with a couple of MSI motherboards, one 880gm and the other a 760gm?

With new HDDs out of stock all over I'm wondering if I should put through an order
cancellation.

Or can HDDGuru Low Level Format make an SAS ready for use this way?

[loninapleton]

I see now that the SAS/ SCSI HDD will not connect properly and I have put thropugh a cancellation.

[Platters_n_Heads]

Easiest solution is if you buy a cheap SAS 6Gbps HBA off Ebay which will take up a PCIe x8 slot in your PC, it'll work nearly flawlessly. Windows can initialize and format it no problem, and you wouldn't even know it's a SAS drive. Programs like smartmontools and HDSentinel can perfectly check the status of it, but I can't get CrystalDiskInfo to do the same.

Just make sure the used SAS drive didn't come out of a NetApp or EMC kit which has "odd" bytes/sector formatting but so long as it's 512/4096 logical, you're good. There are tools to reformat it back to 512/4096 but that takes more steps to get up and running.

I personally run a 18TB WD SAS 12Gbps for mass storage in this configuration without a problem. SAS disk offers some additional monitoring (like Background Media Scan automatically to detect bad sectors) that SATA drives don't normally do.

I guess the other niggle I haven't figured out is with a Windows shutdown, the mobo SATA controller appears to issue spinning SATA drives spindown to idle or something. SAS disks attached to HBAs don't get the signal and appears to get its power yanked which is annoying but probably okay. For those reading, I'm up for suggestions for Windows configurations to remedy this...

[loninapleton]

This is a very good reply. You are more familiar with the ins and outs of SAS drives. All of my
equipment is very old. That, and I want to be able to plug and replace easily. The vendor was very understanding and offered some alternatives off of his list which is a 'real' business so far as I can tell.

But since I now had two failed orders (one new at a popular online site) and this one which could not just roll over the payment and was cancelled-- with all that I'm going to wait til my accounts clear and start over.