SAS Disk Drives Appearing in Larger Mid-Range Arrays

2.5″ and 3.5″ 10,000RPM (10K) and 15,000RPM (15K) SAS disk drives have been available for entry level and SMB solutions from the likes of Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Infotrend, LSI, NetApp, Promise, Sun and Xyratex among others for some time now. HDS recently introduced a new mid-range solution the AMS 2000 that supports up to 480 3G SAS drives in place of traditional 2G or 4G Fibre Channel disk drives.

The benefit of supporting SAS disk drives moving forward is that as volume production and adoption increases, price will decline making the drives more affordable not to mention that the controller and interface chip sets and internal adapters support both SAS and SATA disk drives removing additional cost and complexity from storage systems. Similar to how Fibre Channel disk drives replaced parallel SCSI, SSA or other propriety disk drives, and how SATA replaced parallel ATA (PATA) drives, dual ported SAS disk drives continue the cycle of replacing Fibre Channel disk drives at the entry level and mid-range and eventually finding their way into high-end and ultra-high-end storage arrays over the next couple of years as 6G SAS drives begin to appear.

Watch for a SAS drive to appear in a storage system or server near you soon.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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