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storage - Are SAS Drives really worth their money and are they much better than todays latest SATA?

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The price difference between SATA and
SAS is really very big. Of course I understood, that SAS drives have their advantages,
but does this really legitimate a price difference of 100% or more? Should I really
spend 1 Euro per GB?




Of course I
understand, that this comes down to my usage of servers. But in may case we are not
taking about high performance computing, but merely file servers and web servers
etc.



I tried to find some information about this
topic, and it came down to the following:
(I did not find statistics, that
back up any of that)



A) SAS Drives are better in
big numbers
B) The SAS Protocol is superior and allows more control and
optimisation
C) The quality of the SAS Drive is also expected to be better, as
those drives are produced for enterprise market (of course I am aware, that SAS does not
mean, that a Drive has a better quality)
D) Drives with higher speed are
available for SAS.




Now for my
scenario, the prize for SAS seems insane. I need some big storage for educational videos
and text-books - and for the price of SAS I might be able to buy triple or even
quadruple of the storage.



Further I am applying
RAID 10 and backup (both onsite and offsite) - So I think we are pretty
safe...



Nevertheless there are two things, that
should be considered:



Bottleneck-Situation:
I want to avoid
the situation, where I buy a nice and fast server, that again has a bottleneck, which
might be the drive. And we will have scenarios, where we want to use
.




We have enough RAM - 64 GB per
Processor - so our will completely fit into the RAM. The speed of the Hard-drives is
more important for the serving of files and
flash-streaming.



Reliability:
Of
course, these hard-drives will run 24/7 - so do give SAS such a big PLUS in reliability?
I have read different opinions - also in this platform - mostly backed up anecdotical
(e.g.Warranty for SAS 5 years, for SATA 2 years - but than another person found the
opposite case ;-))



How I see it now, we should
stay away from real SAS - and use NL SAS and rather buy another storage
unit.



Answer




Yes, SAS drives are worth the cost.
Error-correction, the SAS protocol and more predictable failure modes give SAS drives an
edge over SATA.



If those reasons aren't
compelling, you can certainly use SATA, but design for eventual failure. Use a href="https://serverfault.com/questions/339128/what-are-the-different-widely-used-raid-levels-and-when-should-i-consider-them">robust
RAID level and try to avoid the mixing SATA and SAS disks on SAS expanders (if
possible, try to avoid expanders
entirely).




See: href="https://serverfault.com/questions/331499/how-can-a-single-disk-in-a-hardware-sata-raid-10-array-bring-the-entire-array-to">How
can a single disk in a hardware SATA RAID-10 array bring the entire array to a
screeching halt?


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