SAS Vs SATA in Servers, whats your opinion?

[Harry_Greatorex]

Hey Guys,

 

Im looking into buying a new rack server for our school. It states it can take either SAS or SATA HDD's, and if we buy the drives with the server, we can only get 146Gb SAS drives. We are looking at SATA drives with higher capacity from another supplier as this server will be used for virtualisation. And is RAID 5 an option with SATA?

 

So...i want to know peoples opinions, the pros and cons of having SATA or SAS drives in a server. List below! Also, vote on what you prefer, SAS or SATA!

 

Thanks Guys!

 

Harry

[Gaz]

Where are you buying it from that only allows 146Gb SAS drives? Have you considered SSD's?

[localzuk]

SAS drives are faster and more reliable.

 

I would be looking for new suppliers if they can only get you 146GB SAS drives, or if they only offer you SATA. You can get 1.2TB SAS drives now, for example.

[zag]

I'd go for SSD's if you don't need that much storage.

 

We use them in all our servers now over a SATA connection and they work great, not to mention being far more reliable than traditional spinning disks.

 

Since we upgraded to SSD's, the interface has become pretty irrelevant.

[Arthur]

Have you considered SSDs?

+1. SSDs will be considerably faster than any SAS HDD.

 

Since we upgraded to SSDs, the interface has become irrelevant.

I wouldn't quite go that far. We will always need something faster like NVMe PCIe SSDs.

 

www.anandtech.com/show/8104/intel-ssd-dc-p3700-review-the-pcie-ssd-transition-begins-with-nvme

Edited June 5, 2014 by Arthur

[Norphy]

And is RAID 5 an option with SATA?

 

The interface on the disk is irrelevant to the RAID level that you can use. As long as your controller supports it, you can use any disk.

 

However, RAID 5 should not be used any more. Magnetic disks are just too big. Should one fail, the recovery time is very long and the amount of stress on the disks is increased considerably while the array is recovering. This makes it more likely that one of the other disks could fail and then bang goes your data. Ideally, you should be using RAID 6 at a minimum but preferably RAID 10 or 60.

 

Or drop RAID entirely and use something along the lines of ZFS or Storage Spaces.

[johnat1121]

I would say Intel Enterprise SATA SSDs or a PCIe SSD if your in a school environment because if you don't get the budget to replace the server they are in when it fails out of warrant you can temporally put them in a desktop where as you cant do that with SAS

[pantscat]

Totally depends on the workload and intended use of the server.

Also depends upon how much storage you need and how many hard disks you're going to have in the server.

 

Generally speaking SAS drives will be faster, more reliable and more expensive.

[SHimmer45]

SAS controllers can use work with both SAS and SATA drives SATA Controller cannot iirc.

unless you need a biblical amount of storage/on a tighter budget i would go with SAS, as others have said SSD is an option.

out of interest what rack server are you looking at purchasing?

[synaesthesia]

SSD through and through regardless of interface. As above, SATA works on SAS interfaces (but not vice-versa) so it may be good to use SSD for OS partitions and SATA spindles (enterprise level, same MTBF rates as SAS but generally slower) for mass storage if required. But with the disruptive pricing coming from SSD providers (Crucial MX100) and stonking warranties with pricing to match (Sandisk pro) maybe a month's wait will out a far better overall choice.

[Guest Guest]

Wouldn't touch SATA RAID 5 with a bargepole for the reasons outlined. As said we need to know what you are going to be using the server for. But... SAS RAID 10 is what all of our servers use, apart from the backup servers which are SATA raid 6.