Serial Attached SCSI or SAS Vrs SATA Analysis

by Dave Altavilla — Thursday, August 17, 2006, 08:15 AM EDT

Serial Attached SCSI or "SAS" as it is commonly known, has been around for a while but it certainly hasn't taken off, especially in the Desktop space, like Serial ATA (SATA). GamePC, one of our favorite places for serious technical analysis and a highly underrated site, takes a look at a pair of Seagate SAS drives and compares them to WD's 10K RPM Raptor drives. Of course the 15K RPM SAS drives rip up the Raptors in RAID 0 testing but then again the older 74G Raptor models were used (for-shame!). Regardless, there's good data here for consideration in your next RAID setup.

"Today at GamePC, we've taken our first real look at Serial Attached SCSI technology, by testing a pair of high-end SAS hard drives on a new PCI-X based LSI Logic SAS controller card. We grabbed a pair of Seagate Cheetah 15K SAS hard drives and benchmarked them against a pair of SATA's finest, Western Digital's Raptor 10K hard drives. We tested the drives in single and RAID-0 modes to see if this latest iteration of SCSI still can maintain a performance edge over Serial ATA."

We're going to be rounding up a bunch of PCI Express-based SATA controller cards here at HH in the near future and we think you'll find it to be a fairly interesting perspective on alternatives to on-board RAID controllers. Hardware-based RAID versus Software-based RAID and what to do with that shiny new X4 PCIe slot on your motherboard... decisions, decisions.

Tags: ATT, SATA, sas, attached, SIS, analysis, CSI, SCSI, VR, AC

Serial Attached SCSI or SAS Vrs SATA Analysis

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