Upcoming Computing Technology: SAS 3.0

Continuing our Upcoming Computing Technology series, courtesy of Supermicro NZ, today we’re touching on SAS 3.0 – the next generation in server-grade storage connectors.

This is what Supermicro had to say about the second of these developments, SAS 3.0:

“Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 3.0 12Gb/s has been around for a year but mainstream consumption is expected to rise rapidly later this year due to more products being made available. This latest revision of SAS brings twice the performance over SAS 6Gb/s, providing more bandwidth between hosts and end storage devices. This will be welcome news for users of SAS expanders to build large storage arrays or to connect more drives to existing systems. Be aware that this technology update brings along new cabling standards mini-SAS HD (SFF-8643 and SFF-8644) to replace the existing mini-SAS (SFF-8087 and SFF-8088).”

SAS and SATA (discussed in the next post) are two different drive (where you store your files) connection types which, as explained here, differ in their combination of price, storage capacity, and performance. SAS is typically the better option for servers as it offers greater performance – a critical factor when interacting with multiple workstations at once. Having twice the bandwidth over its older counterpart means that files are transferred up to twice as fast, so more people can write and read files at one time without bringing the transfer speed to a crawl. This speed boost will really come into play now that SSDs are becoming more mainstream.

That’s it for SAS 3.0. Next week I’ll touch on the third development, SATA Express (SATAe)