07-21-07 06:12 PM
Peter wrote:
> Hi
>
> I might have had too much sun today, so please bear with me...
>
> As I understand it there are presently two major hard disk interfaces
> on the market; SATA and SCSI; and with SAS we see sort of a merge
> between the two.
SATA and SAS drives will share a common interface connector, but the
protocol talked over the wire is different. This will allow you to use a
common backplane in the array thaat can take either SAS or SATA drives,
but you'll need a controller that can talk both protocols if you want to
mix them.
>
> There is still a major price difference between "native" SATA v.s.
> "native" SCSI disk drives, I guess due to additional features and
> higher data transfer performance due to higher rotational speed.
And there will continue to be such a difference, especially if you are
comparing prices of consumer SATA drives with SAS.
>
> Question: with SAS will it still make sense for manufacturers to
> produce two separate hardware platforms or will we see a merge between
> the two? Or have I been fooled and there is already today just one
> platform with two different interfaces (and price points)?
Most of the vendors I've talked to see a common backplane that can
support either drive as a natural evolution, if only because of the
savings in not having to manufacture two separate product lines. The
more interesting question is whether SAS displaces FC as the drive
interface in higher-end applications.
>
> If the platform would be the same; I guess we could have 15000 rpm
> disks that at low usage could throttled down to, say 5000 rpm for
> lower power consumption and noise?
If you've got applications that only need 5K RPM performance, then it
would be much more sensible to use 7.2 RPM drives and throttle them down
than to use 15K RPM drives, keepp those for the applications that need them.
--
Nik Simpson
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