Skip to main content

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

itemprop="text">

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?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

linux - iDRAC6 Virtual Media native library cannot be loaded

When attempting to mount Virtual Media on a iDRAC6 IP KVM session I get the following error: I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and: $ javaws -version Java(TM) Web Start 1.6.0_16 $ uname -a Linux aud22419-linux 2.6.28-15-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 31 13:39:06 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2009 mozilla.org On Windows + IE it (unsurprisingly) works. I've just gotten off the phone with the Dell tech support and I was told it is known to work on Linux + Firefox, albeit Ubuntu is not supported (by Dell, that is). Has anyone out there managed to mount virtual media in the same scenario?
Post a Comment
Read more

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits,
Post a Comment
Read more

apache 2.2 - Server Potentially Compromised -- c99madshell

So, low and behold, a legacy site we've been hosting for a client had a version of FCKEditor that allowed someone to upload the dreaded c99madshell exploit onto our web host. I'm not a big security buff -- frankly I'm just a dev currently responsible for S/A duties due to a loss of personnel. Accordingly, I'd love any help you server-faulters could provide in assessing the damage from the exploit. To give you a bit of information: The file was uploaded into a directory within the webroot, "/_img/fck_uploads/File/". The Apache user and group are restricted such that they can't log in and don't have permissions outside of the directory from which we serve sites. All the files had 770 permissions (user rwx, group rwx, other none) -- something I wanted to fix but was told to hold off on as it wasn't "high priority" (hopefully this changes that). So it seems the hackers could've easily executed the script. Now I wasn't able
Post a Comment
Read more