Comments on: SAS vs SATA: SATA on the ropes.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:17:00 +0000

“Oh – and on the note of the finance committee. God only knows, I’ve learned though that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. ”

Thats a slippery slope and generally a two way policy.

On SAS being better than SATA – other than bragging rights i remain unconvinced that its more than marketting features at this point.

By: Tory Skyers

Tory Skyers — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:55:53 +0000

Jeremy, you had the same response I did!! I don’t know if hellafast is a word but it should be used to describe setups like you’ve mentioned. How do the SATA RAID 0 compare to the SAS? Take a peek over at my follow up blog post of a setup similar to yours. http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/04/10/sas-storage-on-a-windows-vista-desktop/#comments

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:08:40 +0000

Arguments I can’t give you– unless your financial approver appreciates a blazing fast disk subsystem! My main Windows box is based on an Intel D975XBX2 + Dell PERC5/i RAID0/1/5/10 controller with 256MB cache. The fact this combination *works* is a critical thing. The PERC5/i is a fairly inexpensive board, but the price paid is that it’s pretty much only compatible with systems based on the 975 or S5x00 chipsets (the same as those found in Dell’s workstations). Connected disks are two 73GB 15k 3.5″ drives, silent as hell, and three 250GB SATA-1; all RAID-0. It is verydamnfast. @ 15k the SAS disks deliver access times in the low 3ms range, and I expect 2.5″ 15k units would improve upon that. Real-world transfer rates are mostly bottlenecked by everything else on my LAN, but I’ve seen steady 147MB/sec writes.

Just do it. It’s not that bloody expensive anymore, and it’s completely worth it!

By: Tory Skyers

Tory Skyers — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:45:22 +0000

Thanks, .

I’ve been tracking SAS disks on pricewatch.com and they aren’t bad, but you are right there is a cost advantage for SATA.

I haven’t built or bought a SAS array quite yet, my buddy Karl has the Adaptec SAS controller w/ 128mb onboard RAM, he hasn’t settled on what drives he wants yet, the controller won’t do write cache w/o the battery (100$+ option) so his numbers are w/o write cache. He tried it w/ some first generation SAS drives from eBay and didn’t hit his magic 200MBs sustained so he’s back to hunting for drives. I’m waiting in the wings :0 living vicariously. Hahahaha.

By: Helliouse

Helliouse — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:15:11 +0000

Hello, good blog, and i am just thinking the same thing. Also realizing how “big” of a stoage geek i am.
I use to run SCSI 160 10k’s and loved it, I still think it is faster then my single SATA, and about as fast as my striped SATA array.

My hang up is cost, 4TB SATA RAID5 = cheap, 1TB SAS RAID5 = Dead and buried.
Even with two 36G 10k/15k striped you are looking at quite a cost, though i could get away with that expence.

If you did get it how is it working?
Have you benchmarked it to see what you are getting?
What kind of load times? Trasfer rates?
How much to you love it?

By: Tory Skyers

Tory Skyers — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:35:58 +0000

I use Windows Vista for some of the stuff I do at home, I have a SATA-II disk and when I play Simcity 4 and alt+tab out then alt+tab back in my disk spends 4 minutes doing stuff… What exactly, I don’t know, but 4 minutes of my life is sucked away by it. My computer is newer (dual core Intel), the disk is SATA-II 300 w/ NCQ. Funny thing I don’t have as long a wait for disk access on my XP or Linux based physical machines.

I also run Vmware on my home array to virtualize my content filter (I have an 8 year old that likes Pokemon, so I filter EVERYTHING that comes in the house) along with other services I offer to the users I also call my family. Vmware is acceptable and I considered it even fast until I used these SAS drives at work .

One of the services I offer the family is streaming video, I digitize the kid’s DVD’s so I don’t go broke replacing them after the youngest uses it as a chew toy. I serve it up to a couple computers different computers.

All this and more off one array and controller.

Oh you are geek enough hahaha you do the same math almost all geeks do: 4 bays x 3 drives per bay = Sweeeeet!!

I like that advice, I think I’m gonna stop by Best Buy on the way home today wish me luck!!!

By: Jesse

Jesse — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:19:28 +0000

Oh – and on the note of the finance committee. God only knows, I’ve learned though that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:18:18 +0000

LOL – I have the same argument. I saw the greatest enclosure at MicroCenter last week, 4x 2.5″ SAS/SCSI drives (since it’s just pass-through at this point, it doesn’t really matter which you use, the pinout is the same) that fits into a 5.25″ half-height enclosure, basically the size of a CD-Rom drive.

Now I looked at that, for a price tag of about $70, and thought what every storage geek thinks:

I have 3 bays in my server, that’s 12 drives, right?

As I’ve said before, I can’t, (and couldn’t) see the demand for speed in any home-based application, so I went with SATA-II on my multiple terabytes of storage.

I don’t know, maybe I’m not geek enough for this blog.

Jesse G.
http://www.sangod.com