SATA vs SAS As Fast As Possible

SATA is the dominant interface for hard drives these days, but could SAS be a powerful alternative for your setup, or is it just too impractical?

[LazerLord]

IDE cables can be a bit ugly, but one of my friends bought IDE cables that had rainbow wires. It looked amazing!

[ddha]

I have a friend who was in the SAS for 6 years.

[EposVox]

Thanks for the clarification, I never bothered to learn what SAS drives were beyond "they're server drives."

[Steve_Larson]

I built a (4) 146G 15K drive SAS RAID 0 array back in the day. Sustained read/write speeds were comparable to a single modern fast SSD (around 500MBps), but with 20x the power consumption and LOTS of heat. We really have it good with our SSD's.

[ganaraminukshuk]

"SAS stands for Serial Attached SCSI".

Alright, what's SCSI? <Looks it up> "SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface".

Somehow I feel like a video on drive connectors is needed if not already done; like, I remember when ribbon cables (like IDE/PATA) were all the rage when 40GB drives and 128MB RAM was considered a lot (actual stats from our first Windows computer).

[NinesNX]

Anyone else got here because they mistakenly ordered a SAS drive?

[Minitomate]

One time I've wondered what was that weird connector and in this video I finally know why is it for.

[phatputer]

Cheers for the video, have passed this onto the rest of our team so they can maybe explain a bit better to our customers as to why the expanded storage for their servers costs so much more than the extra hard drive they put into their home machine last week.

[ShiroKage]

SAS controllers are always good for splitting out more SATA ports. It's what I do for my FreeNAS box.

[Silvertarian]

Ancient video still helping me out. Thanks dude.

[JJOATz]

Something I noticed is no mention of T10 DIF/DIX or T10 PI/DIF, which helps protect against silent data corruption (SDC). I'm not sure if _all_ SAS drives are capable, though I now you cannot get the aforementioned features on a SATA drive.

DIF = Data Integrity Field
DIX = Data Integrity eXtension
PI = Protection Information

[phillipsusi]

Wait... SATA is also full duplex. Also worth noting is that SAS and SATA share the exact same PHY layer. They differ somewhat in the transport layer, with SATA using a master/slave system with either a single slave or up to 15 via a port multiplier, and SAS using a mesh network system allowing for many drives and host computers to all be connected via switches, and at the higher layer, SATA drives using the simpler ATA command set but SAS drives using the more complex SCSI command set.

[TheBcoolGuy]

This is outdated. This video was uploaded last year.

[RedXons]

Good thing tough is, that you can connect up to 4 SATA drives on a single SAS connector with a breakout cable, as the SAS is capable of carying 4 SATA signals over over one connector.

[tcuscg]

OMG, talk about a throwback, the BROWN cabinets is a Nortel DMS switch at a telco. It looks like a Sprint CO (Wireline). Then I noted this video is 8 years old. I worked in one of those CO's for 10 years. Man, the memories.

[ThisisTechie]

Thanks You, for helping me making my YTP easier.

[immickful]

Sadly, nothing was said about the main advantage of SAS against ordinary SATA drives - error handling.

[DutchMastermind]

If i have a SAS drive and play as S.A.S in game's, will that make my game perform better?

[omarbartolini]

Putting aside performance, the reason you would like to use SAS drives is for the ""build quality"", they're made with very high quality materials and constructed more rigid with extra vibration and shock protection; even including ECC unlike the common use hard drives. Also SAS controllers are better designed and coded.

[crazyinsane]

Eh, not like money's an issue at LinusTechTips. So let's start seeing SAS exclusive builds.