http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/11/18/fujitsu-launches-sas2-sff-drives/1 Fujitsu has joined Seagate in the relatively new market for small form factor 2.5" drives designed for enterprise customers looking to build big RAID systems.
aside from pricing issue, SAS are as loud as a banshee........... like..... UNBEARABLY LOUD loud..... if they can get around that, drop the price to a raptor, then hey... maybe.......
I used to love the 15k SCSI drive I used to run my system from. U320 bandwidth and scary fast seek times made Win2k and WinXP boot times a breeze.
It's quite simple why: they don't make SAS drives for you. 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.
