topic Re: FAS2240 Mixing 3gb and 6gb SAS Shelves in ONTAP Hardware

FAS2240 Mixing 3gb and 6gb SAS Shelves

jasonnash — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:44:17 GMT

Hi,

Looking for suggestions around mixing 3Gb and 6Gb SAS shelves. Currently have a dual controller FAS2240 with a separate SAS and SATA shelf with 6Gb SAS. I have another 3Gb, DS4243 15k SAS shelf which I would like to add to the 2240. I know this will reduce the SAS speed down to 3Gb. Is this a bad idea? Am I likely to suffer a performance hit?

Any feedback appreciated..

Thanks

Jason

Re: FAS2240 Mixing 3gb and 6gb SAS Shelves

radek_kubka — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 15:11:55 GMT

You are allowed to have one transition between 3Gbit & 6Gbit modules within the same stack. In theory performance shouldn't suffer in most circumstances, however some people were saying they had problems.

Have a look at this thread:

https://communities.netapp.com/message/83809#83809

Re: FAS2240 Mixing 3gb and 6gb SAS Shelves

SHARMAMANISH — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 09:15:50 GMT

I would never suggest mixing of SAS drives. It must be the same size & if you are not using than it could be the cause of Performance Bottleneck.

Message was edited by: Manish Sharma

Re: FAS2240 Mixing 3gb and 6gb SAS Shelves

radek_kubka — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 09:44:16 GMT

We are not talking here about mixing drives within aggregate - the discussion is about mixing different types of SAS shelves within the same back-end stack.

Whilst you can fairly easily create multiple aggregates on a smaller system, having more than one stack on FAS2240 is impossible, unless you don't use MP-HA cabling.