I have an HP ML350 Gen 8 server with 8 SAS HDDs of 600 GB each. Since the drives are a little bit old now, I would like to replace them with SSDs.
I would like to know if I can do this, and if I should continue the existing RAID setup.
Current RAID setup:
Best Answer
To answer your first question, you can do this. SAS is an extended form of SATA, you can use standard SATA disks on a SAS controller.
To answer your second question, you should rebuild your array on the SSDs as the block sizes will be different and thus stripe sizes will need to be adjusted to suit, otherwise you will cause excessive wear to the disks as well as hurt performance.
I can't give you a straight answer, but I can point you here - this site mentions that you can obtain a cable to connect 4x drives to a SAS connector. I'm not sure of the specifics of your server, but it possibly already contains one of said cables?
The H200 can present at most 2 logical drives (virtual disks) so your plan for 3 RAID groups wont fly with the H200 controller alone. You could configure the SSD's in one RAID 10 group, and the 8 SAS HDD's in the other but that wont deliver isolation between the IO on the two data drives.
Which document are you referring to that states that the SAS drives must be in slots 0 and 1 for mixed SAS\SSD setups? The H200 user guide doesn't mention that restriction, the only restrictions that are mentioned are that all drives in a RAID group must be either all SSDs or HDDs and either all SAS or all SATA.
Best Answer
To answer your first question, you can do this. SAS is an extended form of SATA, you can use standard SATA disks on a SAS controller.
To answer your second question, you should rebuild your array on the SSDs as the block sizes will be different and thus stripe sizes will need to be adjusted to suit, otherwise you will cause excessive wear to the disks as well as hurt performance.