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Fujitsu launches SAS-II SFF drives
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 18th November 2008
Fujistu is hoping that enterprises looking to cram more drives in their RAID systems will look towards its new range of SAS-II 2.5" units.
As The Register reports, the company has launched a range of SAS-II (Serial Attached SCSI) 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives capable of transferring data at a whopping 6Gb/s.
Aimed firmly at the enterprise market, the basic 10K RPM model – the MBD2 – will be available early 2009 in sizes available up to 300GB. Its meatier brother – the MBE2 – sacrifices maximum capacity for speed with a smaller 146GB being spun up to an eye-watering 15,000 RPM. Perhaps not surprisingly considering the target market, Fujistu has been a bit quiet on pricing.
Both drives are, interestingly, in the 2.5” form factor – a radical departure from the more common 3.5” form factor preferred by corporations. More commonly associated with laptops, the smaller form factor allows for smaller motors – which, in turn, means the drives consume less power than their full-size counterparts. Indeed, Fujitsu is hoping that by using smaller drives its customers will be able to cram more individual devices into a rack – meaning a massive increase in IO operations per second, and better benchmark results, for the same space and power consumption.
While Fujitsu is the latest company to attempt to break into the enterprise storage market with its small form factor drives, it's by no means the first: that honour goes to Seagate which has already launched similar SAS-II drives. While the Fujitsu 15K model has the edge in capacity – by a whole gigabyte – the Seagate Savvio drives are available with hardware-based encryption, an option sadly lacking from Fujistu's offering.
Tempted to set up a mini-RAID with these little disks that punch well above their weight on an Asus P6T Deluxe? Or are you waiting for a SATA 6Gb/s 10-15k RPM unit at a less 'enterprise' price point? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Comments (3)
if they can get around that, drop the price to a raptor, then hey... maybe.......
2.5" drives have been common for quite some time. More often than not, it's far more important to get as many spindles as possible into xU of space for performance reasons, than it is to squeeze as many gigabytes as is possible into the same rack space. Add to that, the 2.5" drives actually seek faster than equivalent 3.5" models. Why? Well, the platters are smaller! Simple, really :)
A small correction whilst I'm on a roll; SAS stands for 'Serial Attached SCSI'. I wasn't aware they tunnelled SCSI commands over SATA...
Good to see SAS-II drives coming to market, however. There's a lot more reliance in the SCSI world to use expanders, and SAS-II can only mean good things when that's involved. That and, the performance of some SSDs would actually saturate the 300MB/sec SAS performance.