We posted a comprehensive article on Serial Attached SCSI almost a year ago. It discusses hard drives, host adapters, RAID controllers, storage enclosures and even a complete storage subsystem. In short, SAS is fully compatible with SATA, but not vice versa. So, you can operate any Serial ATA hard drive on a Serial Attached SCSI controller. This is important for high capacity storage arrays; while SATA drives are available at up to 750 GB per drive and will hit one terabyte within a few months, SCSI and SAS drives are available at 147 and 300 GB. If you really need the highest capacity storage available, there is no way around SATA drives that are validated for long-term 24/7 operation.

Fujitsu MAX3147RC (147 GB, SAS)

The MAX3 RC series represents Fujitsu's current high-performance professional hard drive family. It spins at 15,000 RPM and offers capacity points of 36 GB, 74 GB and 147 GB. Fujitsu says its read seek times are 3.3 ms and write seeks are 3.8 ms. All drives carry 16 MB buffer memory and utilize a SAS interface. Fujitsu implements FDB motors (Fluid Dynamic Bearing) and an on-the-fly ECC (Error Correcting Code). The temperature operating range is 5°C to 55°C (41°F to 131°F); the drives require 11.5 W idle power. This drive provides up to 93 MB/s data transfer rates and average access times of 5.7 ms.