On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 03:09:45PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:SAS the statistics company? SAS the Scandinavian Airlines? SAS the School of Advanced Study? http://www.sas.ac.uk/ SAS the Surfers Against Sewage? http://www.sas.org.uk/ SAS the Special Air Service? SAS the Society for Applied Spectroscopy? SAS the Society for Applied Sociology? SAS the Society for Amateur Scientists? http://www.sas.org/ SAS the Singapore American School? http://www.sas.edu.sg/ SAS the Static Analysis Symposium? Ah ha!!! About the 40th Google hit is "Serial Attached SCSI". Talk about an ambiguous TLA!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS has an even longer list...I think they should have put their acronym into google before accepting it. :) Even SSA (serial scsi attach) might have had less conflict, although certainly not none. Too late now, they already have standards and nice logos and such done.
Ah, but SAS was mostly non-conflicting in the storage world. Remember that SSA is both the architecture: Serial Storage Architecture (IBM SSA*) and a brand acronym for the Sparc Storage Array.
When it comes to the SATA vs SCSI argument, the question is if you are seek-limited in your load. If you are, you want more RPMs on your drive, which leads to SCSI. Also, SCSI parts usually less troublesome. But then, if you have many drives, you have to plan for failure anyway.
Note that due to the workings of linux io scheduling, multiple (how many depends on tuning) pure-bandwidth streams turn into a seek-limited io load.
If you need huge ammounts of storage or only a few simultaneous high-performance streams, SATA is the way to go.
Btw, SCA has been a standard connector for many years now. It's the standard for scsi hotswap slots.
*) Btw, ftp.se.debian.org would enjoy a donation of IBM SSA, if anyone happens to have some 18G+ drives around. Say a couple of racks or so? :)
/Mattias Wadenstein - responding to half the thread in one mail