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