[geeks] SATA Cards

nate at portents.com nate at portents.com
Thu Jul 2 11:54:57 CDT 2009


> Sridhar beat me to it to suggest SAS, since that does seem to be the
> successor to (p)SCSI.  However, like most things SCSI, it's more
> expensive.

Successor?  It is SCSI.  SAS literally stands for Serial Attached SCSI.

> Interestingly, the storage arrays we design at work (Dell|EqualLogic)
> all use SAS controllers to talk to the drives; SATA drives work, but
> only with a dongle on the drive sled to convert the dual-channel SAS
> signals to SATA.

SAS is a superset of SATA and uses the Serial ATA Tunneling Protocol (STP)
to communicate to SATA devices.  (SAS controllers use Serial SCSI Protocol
(SSP) to talk to SAS devices.)

- Nate



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