SATA or SAS for file share storage

[gshaw]

Another straw poll just to get an idea of what's out there and working well

 

For VMs, Exchange and SQL SAS is a no-brainer, the faster the better so we'll probably be getting 15k drives there.

 

For user file shares, department areas etc I'm thinking SATA makes sense from a cost per GB point of view but will 7200rpm drives give enough performance if people are hitting them simultaneously for mandatory profiles, roaming profiles for staff plus the usual file IO? At the moment the profiles and data for staff are on 10k RAID5 SCSI disks and the student profiles and shared data are on another server, SCSI again.

 

What have you got on your SAN for data and does it perform well?

[CyberNerd]

yes SATA for shares and SAS for virtual images and O/S

 

I would be inclined to look at SSD SATA for virtual image LUNs in future.

[alexsanger]

Agreed - looking at expanding our SAN with an eclosure of SATAs for file shares and keeping the 15k SAS drives for VMs and SQL. Depends a bit on how you set up the disk pools, virtual disks and RAID settings on a SAN though. My last place had SATA drives in almost all the servers - not my spec, but for the most part it was fine.

[dhicks]

For user file shares, department areas etc I'm thinking SATA makes sense from a cost per GB point of view but will 7200rpm drives give enough performance

 

Yes, but if you're unsure get a hardware RAID card with a large onboard cache (1GB) - everyone loading the same mandatory profile, for instance, should get data from the cache without having to read from any drives.