You would also be stuck with a half-duplex connection that looses a lot of intelligence. Not to mention most servers run SAS controllers, meaning you are taking an immediate hit in performance due to the SATA/SAS tunneling protocol overhead. I know it's anecdotal, but when we moved from 1TB Seagate Constellation SATA drives to SAS drives, we saw a roughly 10-15% increase in throughput from the drives running sequential transfers. Only difference was the controller boards talking the native protocol. Plus, Aside from raw performance, storage density is vital in the enterprise space. Having high performance high density storage is a true breakthrough. My first thought wasn't "Wow, this is the best thing ever for speed!" It was wow, this is great! We could put 48TB in an off-the-shelf 2U enclosure and still get blistering performance across the entire storage space!
Also, we are still talking $2/GB. Yes consumer grade SSD's are down to around $1-$1.50/GB, but the enterprise space is still dominated by $5/GB+ solutions. This is a massive price break from the current offerings.





Reply With Quote