Expensive price for such capacity. I prefer buying 2 x 500 GB or a terabyte for larger capacity.

1x OCZ 64GB SATAII SSD = ~270$USD [pricewatch]

or

2x 15k_rpm Fujitsu SAS 73GB + Dell PERC 5i = ~200$USD [ebay]

superior initial performance and incredible scalability and RAID options.

the choice is obvious..

This looks awesome! I wonder if one of those could replace my 3x WD Raptor 36 (striped) ; sas drives don't work on an ordinary ich9r controller do they?

neiroatopelcc,

sorry.. SAS requires an aggressive commitment. typically SAS
controllers cards come in pci-x, but the dell perc 5i line can
be found [ebay] in the pci-e version.. given your mainboard has
a free pci-e 8x slot .. which usually means an SLI board.. or triple
for those of you already running twin rigs. the benefits here being
you can set your stripe size to 1mb.. and you get ddr256mb cache + BBU.

here are my figures: via HDTach [raid-0: 73GB 15k sas fujitus + perc5i]
http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/940/boredeq1.jpg

How about some sound tests? I have been debating these versus SSD since they were announced but was curious as to just how loud they were. You do mention you can easily hear it but it would be nice to get a sound reading from say 1 meter away or somethign like that. Also how hot are the drives getting? How much cooling will I need for these, especially with 3 or them in the box?

which would be better for a thin client server, SSDs or one of these SAS drives?

http://www.vr-zone.com/articles/AS [...] /5978.html

ASUS Announced P6T Boards For Core i7 Nehalem

SAS Support for Server-level Storage

To match the supreme performance of the new platform, the ASUS P6T Deluxe will adopt the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) controller to let users utilize SAS hard disks. These hard disks will provide higher data transmission speeds and better data storage reliability in comparison to current SATA interfaces; and could herald the start of a new standard for mainstream storage devices that caters to enterprise users. With this technological improvement, users will be able to connect 2 SAS hard disks to the P6T Deluxe without the need to purchase an extra SAS controller card. Performance-wise, an SAS hard disk gains a 39% improvement on PC Mark HDD Test benchmarks when comparing RAID 0 performances with SATA (supported by SB ICH10R) interfaces.

Ouch that dell controller is expensive on ebay.de - It'd be cheaper to buy a (new) promise controller for 2 sas drives and a riser adapter to utilize it in a pcie slot (got a p35 board with a x4 link in a physical x16 socket), and get a sas drive or two.... that or wait till nehalem and pray for some other vendor (gigabyte, msi or abit) to implement a sas controller too. No way in hell I'll buy another asus board if I'm given a choice.

It would be nice if the article could actually put SSD numbers in the charts since they keep making reference to them in the text. Just the top 2-3 SSDs would be good so we don't have to manually hunt down other articles to really make the comparison.

I think I'll buy 2 Cheetah's and put them in a Raid 0 for my new video workstation !!!

Access time alone makes SSDs a better option, that and the noise, MTBF and RAID scaling.

I've heard the "Clunk of Death" from head platters for the last time.

Has anyone looked at Compact Flash Cards as an alternative to the $1000 32GB SSD's? 32GB Compact Flash Cards (~$100) are cheap in comparison.

I agree, I expected to see the SSD numbers as well, but from the last couple of SSD articles, Tom's seemed to be a little behind on the latest SSD models.

For example, using the OCZ Core when the superior Core II was commercially available.

Yes instead of MTBF you have time before cells start dieing out from too many read write cycles.

Noise is good though, less power usage is good, and IO performance as far as access times are an advantage.

But the trade off is storage cap, huge price per gig difference. And things like that. I think the best option would be to make a hybrid drive. Things that need high I/O access speed stay on the flash drive, things that need mass storage go on the mechanical disk.

don't forget Intel's upcoming SSD's! They're even faster, and ?cheaper? maybe as well.

AS far as I know the Core II are not yet available.

Well, you can get the Seagate ST3146356SS (147GB) version for around $285 usd before shipping. You can also buy a decent non RAID/PCIe controller(2 port as I recall) for around $80 usd. With shipping and all factored in, we're talking about roughly $400 usd for a single 147GB drive + controller.

That is not too bad *if* you need to performance for video editing, or possibly image retouching(scratch disk) if you are a professional. You may even see a noticeable performance increase on a gaming rig, but really the cost/storage ratio really does not make sense for most. Also while you may have mentioned it, I did not see mention of it - SSDs having no moving parts, would not cause issues with performance because of vibration. Another thing is that *if* you stripe, access times may still nearly double(as compared to a single drive), but access times on SSDs being as small as they are . . . well, it would become a moot point.

On the other hand, I have been thinking for a long time now that SAS HBA's in the home could make sense for the enthusiast. SAS HBA + decent SATA drives may not offer the same performance, but with the right card, and possibly SAS expanders, SAS + SATA == a solution that can scale over time, and can possibly offer performance greater than the home desktop could ever hope to keep up with. Cost effective SAS expanders however are hard to find(for said purpose), which could be the only caveat, other than having an external(*if* external) array that can not be hooked up to just any old system.

Good to see that Seagate is still pushing that performance level higher with their Enterprise drives.

Dell is not the only company you can buy SAS HBAs from. Adaptec, LSI Logic, and 3Ware all sell SAS HBAs. As does Areca, and several others I do not care to think of at the moment. You can get them at anywhere from $80usd for a basic controller, on up into $1000's in the PCIe variants. PCI-X variants are mostly a bit cheaper than their PCIe counterparts, but that probably has to do with supply, and demand.

The price point for a decent controller with 128 + device support through expanders starts at around $400-$450 usd. Expanders on the other hand will also set you back $300-$400 depending on where you get it from, and in what form. Expander racks are ridiculously priced . . .

Yes SAS is expensive - but you get what you pay for, namely high performance, and reliability. In the server market, when your data is worth large sums of money or downtime is expensive, then the higher price of these drives make perfect sense.

The other thing that wasnt mentioned is heat. the 15krpm spindle speed produces quite a bit of heat, so the drive must be cooled, which means fans and still more noise, and so forth and so on...

When HDD fail it's all at once. I'll take slow cell death over catastrophic failure any day.