Today Seagate announced their latest 15K RPM Cheetah drive. It uses perpendicular recording tech to increase performance by 30%, which is an impressive jump. When I get around to upgrading my computer finally around Christmas this year 2 of these drives will probably be a big part of it. These drives will be available for Serial Attached SCSI and that brings me to my next note.
I did some looking on Adaptec's site and found this card. It is their "low cost" solution, at least compared to the RAID 5 cards. The one interesting thing that I didn't realize was that SAS is backwards (sideways) compatible with SATA. Apparently the two technologies use very similar cables and technology. It appears the key difference now between the two is the drive internals. The SAS drives are still touted as more reliable versus SATA. However the difference is 1 Million hours between failure and 1.4 M. When it comes down to it most hard drives will either die shortly after initial use or will last 5 years or more. The specified reliability just doesn't come into it that much.
I would like to hear from Seagate what the difference is from their perspective. Why should I pay 50-100% more for a SAS drive over a SATA one?
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