Seagate ST3750330NS Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS Hard Drives and LSI MegaRAID SA - Page 1

White Paper Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS Hard Drives and LSI MegaRAID® SAS/SATA Adapters Ideal for Low-Cost Servers and Nearline Applications 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. 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 LowCost 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, lowduty 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