I think your arguments are invalid or enterprise would be pushing sata vs sas in configurations > 4 drives.Well i don't disagree, i'm just doing home stuff here. Again, second hand SAS drives used to be available alot cheaper than SATA drives per terabyte, and that was a huge incentive to get a SAS controller. Lately looking at the fleabay markets, that advantage is pretty much gone here in europe. I rest my case, have no arguments.
edit: there could be an argument that running SATA drives over pcie lanes is no less 'professional', infact, it's less complicated and removes complications like bad and/or corrupted SAS controllers, expensive and possibly bad cables, plus the extra conversion between standards. SAS used to be faster and more reliable, now it's no faster at all, and the physical drives are mostly all the same just with different PCB's (nearline sas essentially).
but i digress, your arguments are just as valid.
edit2: another issue is the ridiculous SAS cables, which requires A SATA power connector on top of the SAS connector. In many instances where the case isn't designed for that it makes for a flimsy connection that protrudes alot further out from the drive, in some cases like mine, i had issues getting the side cover on my tower case to fit because the connector was so bulky.
edit3: seems like i did have arguments after all
[Update: Seller Complaints Accumulating] HGST Ultrastar He10 - 10TB @ $129.95
- Thread starter ArthurA
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SAS still has benefits over SATA, it's signaling voltages are higher, more than double SATA's, greatly increasing it’s ability to deal with marginal quality cables and EMI. Between the higher voltages and the dual port design, this is why SAS drives will use more power than SATA drives.
SAS drives also enjoy an expanded command set which has real world benefits if data read issues are encountered.
This is less of a hard and fast rule now a days but SAS drives used to have components that were binned to a higher quality than what was put in SATA drives (platters, heads, vc amps).
edit: my quoting didn't come out right. I was agreeing with you Samir.
Yep and that goes back to the origins of SAS as Serially Attached Scsi because SCSI has different variants such as differential which used better signalling to deal with the increased number of drives on a single channel compared to its consumer rival, IDE or PATA. And if we look at the origins of SATA, it evolved from the bottom, IDE, which depended on the host cpu for data transfers and was a pretty 'dumb' interface while SCSI didn't use host CPU, had its own set of commands and could do things such as multiple commands between hosts and initiators on the bus--things which only came to SATA as it and the SAS interface finally started sharing many things, right down to some parts of the hardware.
But as you mentioned, SAS is still 'the real deal' when it comes to drives if you want the best in storage. It's why it's the standard in enterprise and why even backblaze in their quest to make cheap storage were at one point was using sas controllers and expanders vs multiple sata controllers.
I was always pro SCSI back in the day, so being pro SAS is just par for the course for me.
The spec sheets are the best place to see this as they will have the idle wattage for both sata and sas side-by-side for a particular model.
Consensus is:
- buy at your own risk as the seller has numerous complaints of customer service / post - purchase support. Like, returns, wrong orders, missing parts etc. They will basically ghost you until you open an eBay claim.
- all drives are 4yr to 5yr old with 50,0000 hours (24/7/365 on for 5 years) with huge read and writes during that whole time.
- most drives seem to be fine. but don't invest any real money from this vendor as it's a old hardware usage risk of continued use.
Hello,
I was searching some SMART errors (FIRMWARE IMPENDING FAILURE SEEK ERROR RATE TOO HIGH), and found this thread. The seller deals2day-364 is the same seller we have been purchasing our 8TB and 10TB SAS drives from. All together we have purchased over 260 drives and only had about 9 failures over the last year, that's less than 3.5% failure rate. 6 of those failures happened within the first 20-40 days and even the few that were over the 30 day window the seller graciously accepted and exchanged. The ones which failed 60+ days we just ate and threw away as we initially ordered expecting a 5-10% failure rate on such old drives. Drives are a mixture of 2015, 2016 and 2017 purchased over the past year with between 35k to 55k hours.
My thoughts are since the majority fail out of the box it could be due to shipping and handling. We have all seen the way UPS and FedEx kick these boxes for more than a few field goals.
When buying this kind of hardware we expected higher rates of failure. Our main nodes are running 18 and 20TB Seagate SAS EXOS drives which makes these a pretty good deal comparatively for our daily and or weekly cold storage backups of critical infrastructure giving us two offsite nodes with around 500TB each of usable raid protected storage.
I was searching some SMART errors (FIRMWARE IMPENDING FAILURE SEEK ERROR RATE TOO HIGH), and found this thread. The seller deals2day-364 is the same seller we have been purchasing our 8TB and 10TB SAS drives from. All together we have purchased over 260 drives and only had about 9 failures over the last year, that's less than 3.5% failure rate. 6 of those failures happened within the first 20-40 days and even the few that were over the 30 day window the seller graciously accepted and exchanged. The ones which failed 60+ days we just ate and threw away as we initially ordered expecting a 5-10% failure rate on such old drives. Drives are a mixture of 2015, 2016 and 2017 purchased over the past year with between 35k to 55k hours.
My thoughts are since the majority fail out of the box it could be due to shipping and handling. We have all seen the way UPS and FedEx kick these boxes for more than a few field goals.
When buying this kind of hardware we expected higher rates of failure. Our main nodes are running 18 and 20TB Seagate SAS EXOS drives which makes these a pretty good deal comparatively for our daily and or weekly cold storage backups of critical infrastructure giving us two offsite nodes with around 500TB each of usable raid protected storage.
What are the non-homelab use cases for these used drives? I see folks buying tons and assume they are using them in a business scenario? I've never bought used drives for an enterprise scenario, but I guess it all depends on use case, budget and how you configure/store/backup your important data.
We use them in our off-site backup setups in an enterprise senario. Our sites have moved to full solar+Tesla battery backups so power is not an issue as it is in the datacenter. All of our primary servers run brand new EXOS SAS drives, using the cheaper used drives allows us to maintain two separate off-site backups with one acting as a mirror/failover for less than the cost of using brand new EXOS drives for a single off-site backup. We have found about a 1-1.5% failure rate in the first year with the EXOS drives so 3.5% for the used drives at less than a third of the cost is an acceptable tradeoff for us. With the use of multiple hotspares and the ability to replace the failed drives in minutes to an hour it has been well worth the savings.
As far as data is concerned there is no difference between SATA and SAS drives. I prefer SAS drives because they're faster and because they don't fail as often. Did I mention they're cheaper when bought used?