SAS has been suffering a bit of embarrassment at the hands of SSDs as what once was the undisputed champion for performance in a data centre has been left behind by the quick new flash based upstart.  Adoption of SSDs into those specific areas is slow for several reasons, not least of which is price as you might rightly think.  The other important reason is storage density and that is a huge factor in corporate environments.  Sure the SSDs do things faster, but often at a speed far in excess of what is needed in these environments and they are going to take up a lot more space even if the 2.5″ form factor is used.  Seagate has figured this out and tried to make SAS drives even more attractive by releasing the Savvio series of 10,000 RPM 2.5″ SAS drive in 450GB and 600GB sizes.  Bjorn3D takes a look at their performance and tries to up the ante by adding in the powerful LSI 3Ware 9750-8i RAID card to see if they can get the speeds of the drives up.

“A few weeks ago, we have taken a look at Seagate’s Cheetah NS.2 SAS hard drives, which were standard 3.5′ form factor 6Gb/s 10,000RPM 600GB Serial Attached SCSI hard drives. This time Seagate was kind enough to let us test out their latest Serial Attached SCSI drives, their Savvio 10K.4 hard drives. These drives come in different capacities including 450GB and 600GB, but what makes them so special is that they are 2.5′ form factor, which is what you would use in laptop based system. This is the first time we see a 6Gb/s 10,000RPM 600GB SAS hard drive at such small form factor at this capacity. In my opinion, it is just unbelievable how far we got over the past few years. This means that we are now able to store more data in smaller compartments. Many businesses run into problems where they would need larger server rooms in order to have the capacity they need for their business requirements as well as to make sure that all the data is also backed up. By lowering the size of the drives and maintaining the same capacity, speed, and reliability, businesses can now have the same amount of capacity for their data with half or triple the amount of space they would have needed previously. This allows customers to use the extra space for extra backup solutions or other purposes. Or of course, since there is less space required, the overall cost of the server room can be lowered due to less space needed.”

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