What Is SAS Drives
SAS means Serial Attached SCSI. In fact, a SAS drive utilizes the same form factor as a SATA drive but has other high performance advantages. The greatest one is, there's the platter speed. While average SATA drives run at 7200RPM, a SAS drive works at 10K or 15K. Even 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 utilized in server and high-end workstation environments where speed and I/O frequency reign highest. Now, that being said, there are so many factors in building a screaming fast, but rock-solid, workstation or server.
Wherever speed matters, you have to to be looking at the proper drives first and foremost. Nowadays, I tend to spec in a couple of SSD's (Solid State Drive) in a RAID 0 (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) for the start and applications drive, then for scratch disks/additional storage, I like to do 3-5 or more SAS drives in a RAID 5 (best blend of redundancy and speed, with the addition of parity).
That being said, there are larger considerations, such as the RAID stripe size (or stripe width). The stripe size defines what size blocks of data will be transferred to each drive in the array. It is necessary (where speed is concerned) that the engineer do his job in deciding what the server will be used for. If the application the server is designed for houses small files, or is a file server for smaller files, youwish to prefer a little stripe size, say 256KB or so. So, for people who are doing database work, photo/video/audio editing, rendering or production, they require as big a stripe as the controller allows for.
Last but not least, where stability is concerned, the drives must be properly paired (this is something that 90% of the designers in the world are obvious to which, in turn, can make my job very tough as it tends to give the full white-box market a black eye). If drives in a RAID array are not properly matched by Firmware version, the probability are that at least one of the drives will fail within the first year. Depending on the class of array chosen, this could generally mean the company has to foot the bill for bigger hardware costs, or be as horrific as catastrophic data loss.
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.
