Tom's Hardware: Topic [Solved] SATA versus SAS drives for fibre channel SAN
Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Disks > [Solved] SATA versus SAS drives for fibre channel SAN
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Good question! Answers will depend on whom you ask! 
Western Digital's RAID Edition 3 ("RE3" ) and RE4 HDDs are built
for enterprise applications:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/pro [...] anguage=en
This one might be a good candidate, after you've studied
the most recently published reviews:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/pro [...] riveid=732
However, there is no arguing with the performance measurements
recently done with the latest SAS/6G HDDs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2402.html
e.g. here's an excellent choice for high-density 2.5" enclosures:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/p [...] vio_15k.2/
There is no single SATA HDD that can sustain 200MB/second,
and no SATA/6G HDDs are currently available.
And, there has always been a speed/storage trade-off.
> Why would I want to use more than twice as many SAS drives over the larger SATA drives?
... to achieve maximum speed on the entire storage subsystem,
rather than a hybrid approach i.e. a careful mixture of large/slow storage
and small/fast storage.
To illustrate with a very simple yet realistic example,
drive image files of your OS partition do NOT need to be
stored on THE FASTEST HDDs in your storage subsystem:
they can be best archived on slower, "green" HDDs
that will do the job of restoring your OS partition
whenever the need arrives, but that task may not
need to execute at the fastest possible speed.
MRFS
Best answer
Message edited by MRFS on 09-19-2009 at 06:29:28 PM
Reply to MRFS
Good question! Answers will depend on whom you ask!
Western Digital's RAID Edition 3 ("RE3" ) and RE4 HDDs are built
for enterprise applications:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/pro [...] anguage=en
This one might be a good candidate, after you've studied
the most recently published reviews:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/pro [...] riveid=732
However, there is no arguing with the performance measurements
recently done with the latest SAS/6G HDDs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2402.html
e.g. here's an excellent choice for high-density 2.5" enclosures:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/p [...] vio_15k.2/
There is no single SATA HDD that can sustain 200MB/second,
and no SATA/6G HDDs are currently available.
And, there has always been a speed/storage trade-off.
> Why would I want to use more than twice as many SAS drives over the larger SATA drives?
... to achieve maximum speed on the entire storage subsystem,
rather than a hybrid approach i.e. a careful mixture of large/slow storage
and small/fast storage.
To illustrate with a very simple yet realistic example,
drive image files of your OS partition do NOT need to be
stored on THE FASTEST HDDs in your storage subsystem:
they can be best archived on slower, "green" HDDs
that will do the job of restoring your OS partition
whenever the need arrives, but that task may not
need to execute at the fastest possible speed.
MRFS
Message edited by MRFS on 09-19-2009 at 06:29:28 PM
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