Seagate ST3750330NS Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS Hard Drives and LSI MegaRAID SA

Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS Hard Drives and

LSI MegaRAID

®

SAS/SATA Adapters

Ideal for Low-Cost Servers and Nearline Applications

White Paper

For nearly two decades, parallel SCSI has dominated the high-performance,

high-reliability enterprise storage hard drive market. But, with the need for

increased bandwidth and flexibility, parallel SCSI is nearing obsolescence

due to its fundamental limitations. In recent years, Serial ATA (SATA) and

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) adoption rates have skyrocketed because of

their ability to overcome the previous limitations of parallel ATA and

parallel SCSI.

Users typically select SCSI for one of several reasons; scalability, reliability

and/or performance. With the debut of enterprise SATA drives, which

brought high capacities, low cost per gigabyte, improved scalability

and some improved reliability features, only users requiring extreme

performance made the transition from SCSI to SAS. Enterprise-class

SAS drives (such as Seagate Savvio 15k) are preferred in online and

transactional applications due to their exceptional performance and

reliability. Yet, many system builders and channel customers have found

desktop and enterprise SATA drives to be “good enough” for many Low-

Cost Server and Tier 2 Nearline applications.

There are several tiers that make up today’s storage market.

From entry-level (Tier 3) to Enterprise

(Tier 1), there is Desktop, Low-Cost Server, Nearline and Online storage.

Desktop applications

represent the least demanding storage environment, typically supporting a single user using email,

word processing applications, web browsers, etc. For these applications, desktop SATA drives are

ideal as they are designed to provide appropriate performance and reliability for single user, low-

duty cycle environments at minimal cost.

Low-Cost Servers

are generally used by departmental workgroups or a relatively small group of

users for applications such as file/print serving and small web or email servers. Although Low-Cost

Executive Summary

With SCSI technology dwindling and Serial

ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)

technology gaining ground, many customers

question which hard drive and RAID adapter

are best for their specific application. This paper

discusses the different tiers of storage and how

LSI MegaRAID SAS/SATA adapters and Seagate

Barracuda ES.2 SAS drives are ideal for nearline

and low-cost server environments. It compares

the features and benefits of the new Tier 2 SAS

drives (ES.2), traditional Enterprise SATA drives,

and Desktop SATA drives.

The combination of LSI MegaRAID SAS/SATA

adapters and Seagate ES.2 SAS drives offers a

unique benefit to system builders and channel

OEMs. Both product lines offer advanced

SAS functionality at virtually the same cost

as comparable SATA-only products. And with

support for new features such as multipathing

and load balancing, MegaRAID SAS adapters

can take full advantage of dual port, full duplex

and concurrent active channels on the ES.2 SAS

hard drives; something that no other vendors

can offer today. Together, LSI and Seagate

offer customers an unrivaled combination of

performance, reliability and affordability for

nearline and low-cost server applications.