Imaging SAS drives

Tableau will be hitting the market with their new SAS forensic bridge soon.

Saw it at Techno Security. Will be quite useful in server environments.

In the meantime, we use ForensicSoft SAFE Boot disc to image systems with SAS drives.

I tend to agree with the general concensus here, use the hardware of the machine the disk(s) came from to perform the acquisition. SAS drives are often used in a RAID configuration, so its probably your best option rather than mucking around tryng to rebuild a raid volume.

Personally, I'd be leaning towards using F-Response to acquire over the network. Machines with SAS drives are more likely to have gigabit ethernet these days which gives you a nice theoretical 125MB/s acquisition. Beats frigging around building a custom Windows FE which may or may not end up working with the hardware of the machine you're trying to acquire.

Any updates to this?

Jonathan

I have not had chance to try these yet, however they do appear very similar to ones that are used in ICS imaging products.

These adapters appear to convert a host sas controller to sata. For it to work as suggested it I think it would have to convert host sata to sas.

Regards Richard

These adapters appear to convert a host sas controller to sata. For it to work as suggested it I think it would have to convert host sata to sas.

Regards Richard

Well, NO.
Actually they are aimed to be "piggybacked" on the SAS drive through the (female) SAS connector on one side and expose on the other

• a power adapter (male, i.e. one to which you connect a power cable of the "IDE" Molex type)
• two SATA connectors (male, i.e. to which you connect standard SATA cables)

Looking on the page of the actual manufacturer, CS Electronics, may help wink
http//www.cs-electronics.com/sas-adapters.htm

jaclaz

Jonathan

I have not had chance to try these yet, however they do appear very similar to ones that are used in ICS imaging products.

These adapters appear to convert a host sas controller to sata. For it to work as suggested it I think it would have to convert host sata to sas.

Regards Richard

Got one of these delivered the other week. Trouble is, I've no SAS drives to test them on!

Got one of these delivered the other week. Trouble is, I've no SAS drives to test them on!

But you just had to have one, eh? wink

As for the previous posting, there appears to be a bit of confusion. SAS is backwards compatible with SATA 2, but not the other way around; SAS drives cannot be interfaced to a SATA backplane.

As the CS Electronic sites says

"A SATA drive will plug into a SAS connector but a SAS drive will not plug into a SATA connector!"

These adapters appear to convert a host sas controller to sata. For it to work as suggested it I think it would have to convert host sata to sas.

Regards Richard

Well, NO.
Actually they are aimed to be "piggybacked" on the SAS drive through the (female) SAS connector on one side and expose on the other

• a power adapter (male, i.e. one to which you connect a power cable of the "IDE" Molex type)
• two SATA connectors (male, i.e. to which you connect standard SATA cables)

Looking on the page of the actual manufacturer, CS Electronics, may help wink
http//www.cs-electronics.com/sas-adapters.htm

jaclaz

I looked at the page and saw the warning Remember "A SATA drive will plug into a SAS connector but a SAS drive will not plug into a SATA connector." . I don't wish to be discourteous but I still believe a SAS hba is required and that the suggestion that this backplane will somehow convert a sata hba to enable sas support is spurious.

Regards

Regards

I looked at the page and saw the warning Remember "A SATA drive will plug into a SAS connector but a SAS drive will not plug into a SATA connector." . I don't wish to be discourteous but I still believe a SAS hba is required and that the suggestion that this backplane will somehow convert a sata hba to enable sas support is spurious.

Maybe this clears the matter
http//www.tomshardware.com/reviews/UNIFIED-SERIAL-RAID-CONTROLLERS-PCI-EXPRESS,1665-2.html

Let's complete the sentence 😉
Remember "A SATA drive will plug into a SAS connector but a SAS drive will not plug into a SATA connector." …otherwise we wouldn't have devised this clever adapter, which uses TWO SATA channels.

Or, if you prefer, WHAT would be the use of such an adapter?

jaclaz

Let's complete the sentence 😉
Remember "A SATA drive will plug into a SAS connector but a SAS drive will not plug into a SATA connector." …otherwise we wouldn't have devised this clever adapter, which uses TWO SATA channels.

Or, if you prefer, WHAT would be the use of such an adapter?

jaclaz

I presumed to quote some other suppliers of the adapter that in relation to the 2 SATA connectors, one is marked as Signal-Primary and another is marked as Signal-Secondary. Connect them separately to different SAS HBA/RAID card to achieve Active-Active mode.

Ebay ad for adapter

Regards