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I've already checked the following questions but couldn't find an answer:

Does the backplane on an HP server have any impact on the speed of the drives?
3rd party SSD drive in HP Proliant server only shows 3G transfer speed

In both the above situations the OPs had controllers that were only capable of 3Gb/s transfer.

Here's my question, if I get a Dell R610/R710 server and use a latest LSI HBA/RAID card capable of SATA 3 will the drives run at 6Gb/s or will they be limited by the backplane.

And I'll be using SSDs which is why link speed is a concern.

Community
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user361903
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  • I'm not much of a hardware guy, but if the data has to traverse the backplane then it would make sense that the backplane has an impact on the data transfer speed. – joeqwerty Jun 22 '16 at 14:53
  • @joeqwerty Correct but there aren't different SATA cables for versions 1, 2 and 3 and one generic cable would work for all speeds. So I was wondering if that was the case with backplanes. – user361903 Jun 22 '16 at 15:14
  • I have a dell R510 and the drives are labelled as being 6gb capable, but only report speeds of 3gb. Funny enough is that one of my other drives in a raid 10 config is actually reporting the 6gb speed but the other drives in the raid are only 3 gb. – Mike Dec 10 '18 at 07:43

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The answer is no, the backplane isn't going to be a limiting factor. From Dell's technical guide for the PowerEdge R610 (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/server-poweredge-r610-tech-guidebook.pdf) I cannot find anything to do with backplane negotiation speeds. In my experience working with servers, even on lower end SuperMicro servers the backplane doesn't really matter (unless you try and force a SAS drive into a SATA backplane)

Also, I know for a fact that Dell PowerEdge R610 and R710 servers fully utilise SATA III (6Gb/s) as we use them in our hosting environment in my current place of work.

Hope this helps!

mphowarth
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  • Thanks for the answer! You mind sharing what RAID controller/HBA you use with the Dell servers. And have you checked which SATA version they were using? – user361903 Jun 23 '16 at 19:41
  • Sure, we use Dell's PERC H700 which is basically just a rebranded LSI 9260-8i. We're using 2.5" SAS drives from Dell which are running at 6Gb/s. If you need anything else, let me know! – mphowarth Jun 23 '16 at 22:36