SAS means Serial Attached SCSI. Basically, a SAS drive uses the same form factor as a SATA drive but has other high performance advantages. First of all, there's the platter speed. While usual SATA drives work at 7200RPM, a SAS drive runs at 10K or 15K. Though the platter speed is double than the SATA drives, the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) remains at the industry standard of 1.2 million hours.
SAS drives are typically used in server and high-end workstation environments where speed and I/O frequency reign supreme. Now, that being said, there are many factors in building a real fast, but rock-solid, workstation or server.
Wherever speed matters, you should to be looking at the right drives first and foremost. Nowadays, I tend to spec in a few SSD's (Solid State Drive) in a RAID 0 (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) for the boot and applications drive, then for scratch disks/further storage, I like to do 3-5 or more SAS drives in a RAID 5 (best mix of redundancy and speed, with the addition of parity).
That being said, there are bigger considerations, for example, the RAID stripe size (or stripe width). The stripe size determines what size blocks of data will be sent to each drive in the array. It's necessary (where speed is concerned) that the engineer do his job in deciding what the serversystem will be used for. If the application the server is made for houses small files, or is a file server for smaller files, you want to choose a little stripe size, say 256KB or so. Now, for people doing database work, photo/video/audio editing, rendering or production, they require as big a stripe as the controller allows for.
So, where stability is concerned, the drives must be correctly paired (this is something that 90% of the builders are obvious to which, in turn, can make my job very complex as it tends to give the full white-box market a black eye). If drives in a RAID array are not correctly matched by Firmware version, the probability are that at least one of the drives will fail within the first year. Depending on the type of array chosen, this could simply mean the company has to foot the pay for higher hardware costs, or be as bad as disastrous data loss. - 22787
SAS drives are typically used in server and high-end workstation environments where speed and I/O frequency reign supreme. Now, that being said, there are many factors in building a real fast, but rock-solid, workstation or server.
Wherever speed matters, you should to be looking at the right drives first and foremost. Nowadays, I tend to spec in a few SSD's (Solid State Drive) in a RAID 0 (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) for the boot and applications drive, then for scratch disks/further storage, I like to do 3-5 or more SAS drives in a RAID 5 (best mix of redundancy and speed, with the addition of parity).
That being said, there are bigger considerations, for example, the RAID stripe size (or stripe width). The stripe size determines what size blocks of data will be sent to each drive in the array. It's necessary (where speed is concerned) that the engineer do his job in deciding what the serversystem will be used for. If the application the server is made for houses small files, or is a file server for smaller files, you want to choose a little stripe size, say 256KB or so. Now, for people doing database work, photo/video/audio editing, rendering or production, they require as big a stripe as the controller allows for.
So, where stability is concerned, the drives must be correctly paired (this is something that 90% of the builders are obvious to which, in turn, can make my job very complex as it tends to give the full white-box market a black eye). If drives in a RAID array are not correctly matched by Firmware version, the probability are that at least one of the drives will fail within the first year. Depending on the type of array chosen, this could simply mean the company has to foot the pay for higher hardware costs, or be as bad as disastrous data loss. - 22787
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High performance system requires toSAS hard drives. You should consider to buy SAS hard drives. So,Sata hard drives are good but SAS is more good.
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