Can you show us the other side of the drive? Curious what make/model this is supposed to be. Best guess is that this is yet another attempt by a PC manufacturer to sell un-upgradeable units that need to be either replaced as a whole, services only by then, or had at with wire snips and a soldering iron.
I’d say it’s time to carefully cut out that tab (leaving the keys intact), and to start being more careful about what you buy.
No. SAS is a different protocol and requires a different host controller. SAS controllers can typically handle SATA drives, but not the other way around.
If this is for a server or desktop machine, you could install a PCIe SAS HBA.
Looks like that’s actually “SATA Express,” which has lanes for both PCI and SATA - if you look at the other side of the connector (which you should have already shared!) you’ll see even more contacts. You can get either a PCI or SATA adapter in order to use the drive.
Edit: Probably SAS as others said. It uses the exact same connector, which is why I made that guess.
It’s a 2.5” SAS drive. They’re usually used in servers and typically spin a lot faster than consumer SATA drives. You won’t be able to use it in your PC unless you buy an HBA card and some adapters.
I got a used 8 port card from ebay for about $20 a few years ago. I had to flash different firmware to it using a DOS boot disk to disable raid though. It’s an obsolete card, but it’s been working fine in my NAS.
Why yes it’s a SAS drive. You can find that in some NAS models for home use too. Otherwise this is usually server land.
The thing with HBAs is that you usually only get virtual disks on the system side because the controller masks the real disks. This is not really needed any more since modern filesystems can do RAID functionality too - and even better and faster - but that does require direct access to the drive.
Many controllers can be patched though or come with a pass through (JBOD) mode out of the box, which allows you to use that kind of drive directly again. Such drives can be obtained used for cheap too so this may be a feasible option to extend the possible amount of drives for a desktop computer at home too a lot. Most controllers support 4-8 devices.
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