Hardware: Best performance - SATA or SAS?

Offtopic Chat
1

I was wondering, which harddrives performs best? SATA or SAS? As I understand it, SAS3 has double the bandwidth than SATA3 - 12 vs 6 Gbit, but I guess few spinning drives are able to saturate this in any case? This may be different with Solid State Drives?

I realise that this may have two sides - that SAS drives are more likely to be Enterprise drives than SATA drives, but if the drive is the same - is there any (performance) difference between the SATA and SAS version of that drive?

Thanks in advance!

2

Yes, if you can find them, SAS drives can outperform SATA drives.

They’re getting very difficult to find in modern designs, though, because NVMe has largely displaced SAS as the favorite enterprise grade high speed connection.

I’d advise serious caution that you don’t fixate so hard on finding SAS drives that you end up lumbering yourself with a several year old design at a greatly inflated price.

3

I am currently looking at buying refurbished drives, as that can afford me more drives than buying new. I am also hoping to beat at least some of the “bathtub-curve” although the drives might suffer from transport.

I see both SATA and SAS drives at this vendor, but it seems that at least here, I can get more TB for the same money.

This supplier is Renewtech (former Kimbrer Computer) in Denmark, but I believe that they have outlets elsewhere in Europe (I have no affiliation or connection to them other than buying from them)

4

I’ve had excellent results with refurbished rust, but I’d be extremely leery of “refurbished” SSDs. Write endurance exhaustion is no joke, and can’t really be “refurbished” away.

5

SAS drives have the ability to outperform but whether or not a SATA interface measurably holds back an HDD’s performance is debatable. Personally I’ve always regarded SCSI/SAS as overrated.

Today, storage is bifurcated with 5400/7200 rpm HDDs as the capacity tier and flash as the performance tier. SAS has largely disappeared for the same reason that 10k/15k rpm HDDs are scarce – there’s not much point in either of these technologies in 2024. One deploys flash when performance matters. One deploys SATA when capacity matters.

All that said, if I came across SAS refurbs with a compelling cost per TB I’d be willing to buy. I’m just not paying extra for them.

1 Like
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Agreed 100%; there’s a reason I said SAS drives can outperform SATA drives, not that they do outperform SATA drives. =)

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I guess that depends on where you come from :slight_smile: Back in the day SCSI was the way to go - but that was pre IDE (I had a 20 MB SCSI Hardcard - HDD mounted on the controller board - in my A2000 in the late 80’s/early 90’s)

Anyway my reason to go with SAS is simple - I have more choice in the refurbished enterprise space than with SATA. Most of the used SATA drives that are available are with private persons - I have no clue on the state of those, they wont offer me any form of warranty, and they are asking way to high a price. I can get SATA drives from enterprise refurbishers but as most of the decionmakers yesteryear went with SAS for their servers, there are simply more SAS drives available than SATA from the professional refurbers.

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I was told that SAS 12Gbps was designed for multi-drop use cases. SAS can be connected in a way that multiple drives share the same 12Gbps lane, so multiple drives add up.