Using SAS drivers

[Mr Bigman]

Getting some free SAS drives soon 74 gig ech.

I know their might be better options out their for an OS setup but these aren't costing me any so what would be good to use the drives?

I as thinking of getting a highpoint raid card pciX for 130 bucks and stripe all 4 drives for very fast performance or 2 drives but how good will it be compared to raptors or standard 7200 rpm drives?

[TheBigOne]

Not a good idea
typically its low on cache memory so you are better off with getting a separate cards that allows you to add cache memory but this makes for an expensive disk storage system. SAS drives come in 3.5" and 2.5" sizes and are available in faster spindle speeds up to 15k. The 15k SAS drive are going to be the fastest mechanical drive you can get but may be a bit loud in some cases and typically run hot thus requiring some additional cooling considerations - especially if multiple drives are used in an array. The interesting thing about SAS (and SCSI) is that a these drives can execute multiple I/O requests in the space of a single revolution of the platter while SATA can not (although NCQ attempts to improve on this a little). This paralellsm is really SAS's big performance feature so if your need to your drive to perform 5 I/Os for some reason, and the position of the drive head is in a location that can fulfill the I/O request, then you could conceivable get all 5 of those I/Os done in one turn of revolution of the patter, grabbing those 5 pieces of data much faster than SATA. With SATA it would require 5 revolutions. This makes a big difference in servers which are responding to heavy random Disk I/O such as that of a database, busy file server, or now Virtual servers where multiple virtual server disks reside on 1 physical disk (or array). In fact SAS (or SCSI) disks in arrays are pretty much the norm in these examples.

This said, SAS is most certainly overkill for a home PC and with the cooling and overall noise considerations I would probably pass on it.

Better off with two SSD drives instead, sell the SAS drives and use the money for SSD's

[Mr Bigman]

I may do just that and se what i can get for them off of Craigs or Ebay or find some junky who wants speed cuz of what they are.

The drives im getting are worth about 3 bills so will see what i can get.

[TheBigOne]

Originally Posted by Mr Bigman

Getting some free SAS drives soon 74 gig ech.

I know their might be better options out their for an OS setup but these aren't costing me any so what would be good to use the drives?

I as thinking of getting a highpoint raid card pciX for 130 bucks and stripe all 4 drives for very fast performance or 2 drives but how good will it be compared to raptors or standard 7200 rpm drives?

Card is junk, you would have to spend at lease $550 and up to get a decent SAS controller with as more cache memory, cheap controller won't cut it.

[Mr Bigman]

They pulled the sas controllers on the newer asus boards due to cost and caused unstable isues for some reason.