While discussing with our Dell rep the new product offerings that we will be rolling out in the fourth quarter of 2006 I was thrilled to see that the new PowerEdge 1950 and also the yet to be released PowerEdge 860 will have the capability to house up to 3 disk drives.
Thus expanding our RAID options from only RAID 1 to either RAID 1 or RAID 5 on our standard machines. How do they get three drives in a 1U server you might ask???? Easy… In come 2.5” SAS drives. Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives use a full duplex, point-to-point architecture and command queuing to achieve data transfer rates of 3 Gbps making them much faster then a standard SATA drive that we now offer on our standard servers. The new SAS drives that we will be offering are 10,000 RPM drives compared to 7200 RPM SATA and the price to upgrade to these screamers will be just a few extra dollars per month.
I will admit our NOC team was little nervous about using these SAS drives as we always have to consider power and heat when testing new products but after significant testing on the new SAS drives in a demo PowerEdge 860 Dell sent to us the decision was made to move forward with offering the product. Power and heat never came up as an issues and the feed back I received from our NOC admin George Nelson was I quote “Testing has gone very smooth and we have ran into no issues with OS compatibility. These drives are FAST!!!”
So far we are praising these little screamers and cannot wait to release these fourth quarter of this year. We would love to here feedback from anyone that has any experience in either testing or production use with SAS drives.
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