SAS vs. SATA HHD in Xserve

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.)

 

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!

 

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.