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It's possible. Yes, the drives were sprinkled around in the inventory, and we had some servers where there was a mix of old and new drives in the same box, behind the same controller.

We use the controller in HBA mode, so the controller shouldn't be doing anything fancy, but you might be right.

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I've seen controllers in HBA mode pull some oddball performance shenanigans when presented with differences as small as running different drive firmware versions across connected disks, so it really wouldn't surprise me. SATA drives have a pretty bad reputation for firmware releases introducing unexpected and undocumented behaviors. I used to be on the customer success team for a hyperconverged distributed storage product, and such things were the bane of our existence. Over the years the inventory of product-supported SATA devices shrunk considerably as a.) more and more quirks were discovered in products and b.) flash prices continued to drop to the point that spinning disks were in less and less demand, putting downward pricing pressure on SAS devices.

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