LSI Announces SAS 12 Gb/s Interface

By Doug Crowthers
published

LSI Corporation introduces a SAS 12 Gb/s interface geared to the future needs of the server market.

The company has introduced the SAS 12 Gb/s interface as an add-on card. The card is designed to work with current PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface. With PCI-Express 3.0 around the corner, the card will be able to take full advantage of the system's bus bandwidth. This card can connect up to 44 SAS or SATA devices with support up to 2048 SAS addresses. It is backwards compatible with today's SAS or SATA 6 Gb/s and 3 Gb/s devices.

TheSSDReview


LSI claims a 58 percent increase in IOPS performance compared to a SATA 6 Gb/s due to improved bandwidth aggregation per drive. In addition, LSI is claiming a 65 percent increase in bandwidth yield. In a test using 32 Seagate Savvio 15.3K 6Gb/s SAS HDD drives, the drive array measured an impressive 3106.84 MB/s on Iometer and over 1.01 million IOPS.  

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LSI Senior Vice President Bill Wuertz said, "12Gb/s SAS SATA 6Gbps provides equipment to expand existing opportunities in cloud computing, virtual servers, high-strength I / O applications (it) can be maximized play storage device performance. Future, as the PCI-E 3.0 and SSD development, 12Gb / s SAS will be able to fully release all of the next generation of server performance."

TheSSDReview

Edit: Images and source has been updated to reflect the original source of the images to The SSD Review.

Doug Crowthers
15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Aragorn
    Who is in charge of the SAS & SATA standards? Have they published the 12 Gb/s version of the standard, or did LSI just make this up?
    Reply
  • TheWhiteRose000
    How much is it I want to know.
    I also wanna know if I can test one with a SSD raid.
    Reply
  • It isn't a direct hard drive interface (aka you would go between your server and a storage array)... and 12/Gbs SAS has been discussed for a few years now.

    http://www.interconnectionworld.com/index/display/article-display/7800282046/articles/connector-specifier/standards/2009/11/the-road_to_12-gbit.html
    Reply
  • willcgi
    This might make external GPU's feasible...
    Reply
  • K2N hater
    Looks good but these controllers are restricted to the high-end server market. In our home boxes we're yet to see anything better than software RAID on half working controllers.
    Reply
  • stuckintexas
    Not really impressed on the sequential speed. I am running 24 x Savvio 15K.3 on the LSI 9265 and getting 3300MB/s sequential. Hopefully this helps with the read speeds, because that card maxes out around 2600MB/s.
    Reply
  • clonazepam
    __-_-_-__why they would have to invent something that there's already a specification?external pci-e cables and connectors specifications have been around since 2006 (including external pci-e 2.0 x16). Yet no one ever implements it. This would be specialy important for mobile computing. Just imagine to have a small 12" notebook that connected to an external enclosure with a deskltop graphic card was able to run crysis on ultra high.it is possible it's just a matter of implementation. But no one will ever build such a device. And thunderbolt it's not a solution because it still bottlenecks the gpu.The reason why no one would implement such a great system is simple. A notebook vendor or manufacturer will earn way much more money selling you a new notebook then just selling an upgraded graphic card. You can change everything nowadays cpu hdd odd ram etc but not the gpu.external GPU's are already feasible since 2006. no need for new fancy and proprietary solutions.and btw thunderbolt supports 20Gbps, more then this.The best you can expect is thunderbolt because small device manufacturers will build such a device. we just have to hope that the new ultrabooks uses thunderbolt since currently only 2 notebooks use it (and they cost more then $2000 and have crappy performance).With a thunderbolt solution you can expect about 75% of the gpu performance. not an ideal but it will do the trick.
    That was a selling point on a laptop I bought in late 2005. They touted the possibility of upgrading its gpu via the pcmcia slot (was pcie x1 which made it even funnier), and I chuckled. It's certainly there for whoever wants to build it.
    Reply
  • mavroxur
    K2N haterLooks good but these controllers are restricted to the high-end server market. In our home boxes we're yet to see anything better than software RAID on half working controllers.


    You need to shop for a nicer controller. Adaptec, LSI, HighPoint, Promise, Areca, and others have been making affordable hardware RAID cards for ages.
    Reply
  • dontknownotsure
    If only I had that much money...
    Reply
  • andy_newton
    So how does it stack up against thunderbolt?
    Reply