Seagate announced the last enterprise class 2TB 7,200 rpm Constellation drive last February 9th (2009), and it didn't ship until well into the 4th quarter. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for this so-called shipping drive. By the time its available, most of the other manufacturers will have shipped their 6Gbps drives--I gave up waiting and bought 4 WD Caviar Blacks in September and the Constellations still weren't available yet, SEVEN MONTHS after they were announced...
Where is the difference between a typical Sata 2 hdd and this? I read somewhere that SAS and Sata have almost the same speed. Others say that it doesn't matter how fast you can move data between a pc and an hdd because the hdd must be able to write/read with the same speed and this isn't possible for most drives yet...
So, practically, what this new type of hdd means for customers except the big storage?
SAS drives spin at higher speeds (10K or 15K rpm) but they are smaller in capacity. They are designed better and use a more robust protocol set (SCSI compared to ATA), and usually come with longer warranties, and are subsequently mor expensive. They are usually about 30-50 MB\sec faster than SATA drives. A standard run of the mill SATA drive (let's take Seagate Barracuda AS 7200.12 for instance) will usually get somewhere around 70-90 MB\sec for reads and writes, depending on transfer size. As you can see, this is nowhere near maxing out the speed of the bus (3Gbps), even for SAS drives.
6Gbps SATA and SAS drives aren't really much faster then 3Gbps drives, but it allows the HBA to go faster -- provided you have enough drives to max out all of the PHYs.
A home user running one, two, or even four drives won't notice a difference. The increase in capacity is nice, and the industry IS moving more towards 6gb for both SATA and SAS, but there are 2 tb 3gbps drives also and I'm pretty sure they cost less. 3gb isn't getting EOL'd any time soon either...maybe in 3-5 years for end users; but in the enterprise environment a lot of people are and have been over the past year switching to 6Gb HBAs.
Also FYI, 3gb and 6gb are backwards compatible. Cabling *should* be compatible with both speeds as well, unless it's a really cheapo cable.
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Seagate announced the last enterprise class 2TB 7,200 rpm Constellation drive last February 9th (2009), and it didn't ship until well into the 4th quarter. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for this so-called shipping drive. By the time its available, most of the other manufacturers will have shipped their 6Gbps drives--I gave up waiting and bought 4 WD Caviar Blacks in September and the Constellations still weren't available yet, SEVEN MONTHS after they were announced...
Where is the difference between a typical Sata 2 hdd and this? I read somewhere that SAS and Sata have almost the same speed. Others say that it doesn't matter how fast you can move data between a pc and an hdd because the hdd must be able to write/read with the same speed and this isn't possible for most drives yet...
So, practically, what this new type of hdd means for customers except the big storage?
@Bobot
SAS drives spin at higher speeds (10K or 15K rpm) but they are smaller in capacity. They are designed better and use a more robust protocol set (SCSI compared to ATA), and usually come with longer warranties, and are subsequently mor expensive. They are usually about 30-50 MB\sec faster than SATA drives. A standard run of the mill SATA drive (let's take Seagate Barracuda AS 7200.12 for instance) will usually get somewhere around 70-90 MB\sec for reads and writes, depending on transfer size. As you can see, this is nowhere near maxing out the speed of the bus (3Gbps), even for SAS drives.
6Gbps SATA and SAS drives aren't really much faster then 3Gbps drives, but it allows the HBA to go faster -- provided you have enough drives to max out all of the PHYs.
A home user running one, two, or even four drives won't notice a difference. The increase in capacity is nice, and the industry IS moving more towards 6gb for both SATA and SAS, but there are 2 tb 3gbps drives also and I'm pretty sure they cost less. 3gb isn't getting EOL'd any time soon either...maybe in 3-5 years for end users; but in the enterprise environment a lot of people are and have been over the past year switching to 6Gb HBAs.
Also FYI, 3gb and 6gb are backwards compatible. Cabling *should* be compatible with both speeds as well, unless it's a really cheapo cable.