Hard Drive - SAS-3GBPS

Serial attached SCSI SAS 3gbps hard drives are commonly used in servers and bring with them immense benefits. However, choosing the right hard drive is very important depending on your projects. Avoid putting greater emphasis on the pricing of the hard drives, since it may lead to a complete disaster.

The preserve of the SAS 3Gbps HDD is in servers and high-end workstations where speed considerations are most important. The hard drives are available as 3.5-inch form factor and 2.5-inch form factor depending on your specific applications. These HDDs will process data and complete reads/writes faster than SATA drives – actually, it takes just a fraction of the time. It makes them ideal for enterprise applications since they perform efficiently, faster, and under rigorous conditions. The faster throughput is the idea behind getting SAS hard drives for your applications, seeing that the latest SAS 12Gbps hard disks are super-fast and incorporate RAID hardware controllers.

The throughput of a SAS 3Gbps disk drive is rated at 300 MB/s. Bandwidth typically represents the theoretical maximum level of data that passes through a channel. On the other hand, throughput is the actual measure of how much data actually travels through the channel successfully. Therefore, bandwidth is a theoretical value whereas throughout is the real value.

The key features and capabilities of the popular SAS 3Gbps HDDs are:

• Performance – You will benefit from performance levels that reach 3Gbps (300MB/s throughout), full-duplex transmissions, wide ports for aggregated bandwidth, advanced command queuing, and port aggregation.
• Flexibility – the flexibility of the SAS 3Gbps lies in physical and software compatibility on SATA drives as well as backward compatibility with SCSI software.
• Scalability – you cannot go wrong with the broad address range allowing connection to physical devices and external storage systems using the long cables and small connectors.
• Reliability and availability – you can achieve point-to-point connections, redundancy paths, and dual active port support with the SAS 3Gbps drives.

We have recommended the SAS 3Gbps to a good number of clients since they are best suited for 24/7 workloads. These hard drives are best suited for servers due to the 100% duty cycle. SAS hot-swap hard drives will always win on the reliability front since they are designed to read/write data throughout the day. The SAS 3Gbps HDD cannot be compared to SATA drives commonly used for desktops that have 20-30% duty cycles. Drive speed is a major determinant of throughput and is measured in RPMs whereby SAS drives will operate at between 7200 and 15000 RPM. For better understanding, the faster a drive rotates, the higher the read/write speeds and the higher the throughput. The net effect will apply for slower drive speeds which negatively impact read/write speed and throughput.

The only downside with the SAS 3Gbps hard drives is the storage capacities available. Generally, SAS hard drive disks have a smaller storage capacity format compared to SATA drives. The common storage sizes available for SAS 3Gbps drives include 73GB-10K RPM, 146GB-15K RPM, 300GB-15000 RPM, 450GB-15K RPM, 600GB-10K RPM, 1TB1TB-7.2K RPM, and 2TB-7.2K RPM which are ideal for servers and high-end machines used for production content.

SAS cables are required for connection and feature a continuous connector for both power and data. The SAS cable cannot be used to connect SATA controllers using a SATA connector since they carry higher power voltages. A distinctive feature of the SAS cables is that they are more than 30-feet in length compared to SATA cables that can only reach a maximum of 3-feet in length. However, it is possible to connect a SAS drive to a SATA controller using a continuous/SAS connector.

We have different specifications of the SAS 3Gbps hard drive which are ideal for high-performance applications and for highly virtualized environments that typically handle critical applications and high volumes of users.