SAS vs. SATA HHD in Xserve

[tzidore]

Hello

I'm going to set up a Xserve with 15-30 home directories using OpenDirectory. I would like to have a lot of disc space, but the stability and smoothness is a must.

Is it necessary to buy SAS drives when I only have between 15-30 directories?

Kind Regards
Tino Zidore
FTP/IT-Technician
Fridthjof Film

[exabytes18]

It all depends on which has a higher priority: disk space or performance.

As long as all the home directories are not being used simultaneously, SATA with RAID 5 or whatever you fancy for redundancy should handle perfectly fine.

It sounds like SAS would be overkill in this situation. (Pun not initially intended.)

[drlunanerd]

I'm in a similar situation - am speccing a server up and have to choose between SAS and SATA. I've only ever used SCSI-flavour disks in servers, but really SATA looks compelling now on a price-performance-capacity matrix. SAS drives are piddly little things and once you've added RAID into the equation is it going to make much real-world difference comparing their 10k or 15K rpm speed to 7.2k SATA if you're not running a datacentre?

Also the vendor is being naughty and only giving a 1 year warranty on the SATA drives compared to 3 years for SAS. They obviously really want you to cough up and spec the SAS!

[bplein]

For all intents and purposes, treat SAS as regular (i.e. parallel) SCSI when comparing to SATA.

SAS ~is~ SCSI. Use it where higher IOPs are required, higher reliability, or heavy multithreaded use. SATA is better suited to archive/fileshares if the IOPs requirements are about 1/2 that of your apps that need SAS.