What are the benefits of SAS cables?

Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) is a means of digital data transfer over thin cables and is used in accessing computer peripheral devices. SAS has become the backbone of enterprises with large data center environments where data access must be as quick as possible. SAS cable has unique benefits over other cables and the need for one depends largely on the task a server has to perform. SAS connectors have the capability to make data transfer speeds incredibly fast.

32 Pin Serial Attached SCSI SAS


What does SAS Cable do?


Serial attached SCSI (SAS) is an interconnect fabric that connects the hard drives or SSDs with the server motherboard in large enterprises and high-end workstations. Parallel SCSI was used with the enterprises earlier which were then replaced by serial technology called SAS. The main reason for the shift was to accommodate higher performance along with a number of advantages using this serial technology like SAS connectors. SAS cables are thinner and the connectors are less bulky as compared to the older parallel technologies.

Further, SAS allows each device connected to utilize full bandwidth. So the problems related to crosstalk are less likely in this serial interface because you have to deal with fewer conductors in the cables. In simple words, a SAS cable allows for special wide-port devices so that they can further increase their bandwidth by using multiple channels.

However, SATA interfaces can’t support SAS devices. But they use the same type of cable as SATA. 
But since these SAS and SATA are so much similar, if they are used on the same motherboard it can offer dual support for SAS and SATA and the costs are also very little.

Benefits of SAS:


● Enterprises can save a lot of money if they deploy a SAS infrastructure- cables, connectors, host bus adapters (HBAs), backplanes, and so forth are similar for both SAS and SATA. But it is initially populated with low-cost and high capacity SATA drives. It is possible to plug in SATA based drives along with SAS drives to the same SAS backplane. You might be thinking as the business expands and greater capacity is needed more SATA cables can be added. But some vendors do not support certain features like mixing SAS and SATA in the same RAID array.

● SAS has higher reliability and performance than SATA. A SAS infrastructure can connect more than 15,000 SAS drives in one domain in addition to 10,000 & 7200 RPM, for better performance.

● SAS infrastructure has the ability to support a multitude of SATA drives with a single HBA port. Since SAS uses serial point to point technology, each port connected to SAS cable gets a dedicated bandwidth and the cables are thinner than the earlier parallel SCSI and SATA. Minimal ports on the HBA are required but there are more ports available on the expander, using a SAS infrastructure becomes increasingly cost-effective as the number of devices rises.

● If your organization involves online applications that have critical data that needs to be used by multiple, concurrent users, adding high-performance SAS connectors requires no modification to the existing infrastructure.

● SAS is built for 24/7 duty cycle and hence is suitable for enterprise server storage requirements. Unlike other drives for your home desktop, which have 20-30% duty cycles, SAS is made to read and write all day, every day.

● SAS uses the same SCSI command set and hence applications written for parallel SCSI are compatible with SAS and will work as well.

● Not only is it compatible with SATA but as discussed above it is the most cost-effective storage solution for any task. This compatibility has resulted in eliminating the redundancies and other inefficiencies of purchasing unique infrastructure for both the storage applications.

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