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SAS is breaking out of the enterprise

SAS drives are thriving outside the data center, despite SATA’s cost advantage

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was created to replace SCSI, the long-standing enterprise hard drive interface.  It has done that, but there have been sightings far from the datacenter.  Places like Ravelry, a seemingly home-hosted knitting website:

Rather than shrink in the face of lower priced SATA drives, SAS drives are expanding into SATA’s domain.  What’s going on here?

  • SATA compatibility.  SATA drives interoperate with SAS, so many entry server backplanes and PC motherboards are switching to SAS to cover both interfaces.  This has created a virtual “Storage Foreign Exchange Program” as SATA drives are adopted in the enterprise, and SAS drives are tried in homes and small businesses.
  • Cost. New 1 TB 7200 RPM SAS drives like the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 cost about $50 more than their SATA equivalents.
  • Capacity. The newest SAS enterprise-class drives like Seagate’s 450GB Cheetah 15K.6 offer more capacity than past enterprise drives.  This makes them more affordable on a cost-per-GB basis.
  • Physical size.  The server market has adopted 2.5″ SAS drives en masse, and the storage system market will follow.  These drives use a lot less power and space than conventional enterprise drives without sacrificing performance.  There are no reasonable SATA 2.5″ alternatives today.

If you’re still stuck in a SCSI/SATA mindset, consider a crash course on SAS.

Who’s replaced SATA or IDE with SAS recently?

July 15, 2008 - 8:05 am | By Pete Steege | Posted in Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

2 Comments

  • Casey wrote:
    Jul 15, 2008 at 11:51 am

    Ravelry is hosted at a datacenter :) We’ve got about 5 machines. The master database server is full of SAS drives, everything else is SATA.

  • Pete Steege wrote:
    Jul 15, 2008 at 11:54 am

    Thanks for the update Casey. Tell us about the dog.

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