For SAS drive's I've always had good success imaging them in Windows with a Rocketraid 2640 controller. Well, I got in a batch of Seagate 15.6K SAS drives, and none of them were recognized by that controller. I saw where the next one up, the 2720 specifically mentioned support for 15K SAS drives, so I ordered it. Same thing...it doesn't recognize them at all. I have about 15 of these drives to choose from, and it won't see any of them. Since their tech support is virtually non-existent, I'm hoping to find an alternative.

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a controller that will work so I can get these drives imaged?

The Areca 1300 series works very well for me. 16 Channel.

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Data Recovery Ireland

Are all the drives identical or different kinds?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Seems like I recently worked with a RocketRAID 2640 and some 15.6 Seagates. Does the controller see them in its BIOS? I had to install Windows 7 drivers to see them in Windows.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

They are all 100% identical.

Neither controller is seeing them in BIOS, and I upgraded the firmware and drivers to the latest versions.

They both read 10.2K drives without any issue. These are out of a Hitachi SMS 100. I even called Hitachi just to make sure there wasn't some sort of security measure that would keep the drives from being readable outside of their device. I know it seemed unlikely but I just had to check that off the list of weird possibilities.

It might be a compatibility issue with my motherboards on the 2720 controllers. I could have sworn they had PCI-E 2.0...but it's looking like it's 1.0 and that won't work with those controllers. My 2640's though definitely didn't work with those drives, even with the latest firmware and drivers.

So today I'm going to be upgrading the motherboards and see if that helps the 2720's, and I ordered 2 additional controllers from different brands that I know are compatible with any motherboard I have just to see if I hit on one that works.

I use the Adaptec 1405. It is supported by PC3000 SCSI, if you are going that route. The key for me is to have a controller that does not have built in RAID functionality as when doing data recovery, I don't want conflicts between the RAID controller and the drives when mirroring...sometimes the RAID controller will autodetect the RAID settings from the drive and prevent direct access.

The only downfall with this controller is the it, as with most, are PCI-X, which is not very common on most system boards.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Areca ARC-1300ix-16 is the one , sas/sata host (none raid) controller. 6Gbs speed.
Pc3k SCSI also works well with it. And it is not so expensive.

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Angel Data Recovery