SAS, Fiber Channel, 15k disks & Co

[Kosta 122]

A question into the crowd: is there a reason why we don't see anyone using such solutions? I see them being relatively inexpensive compared to SSD when it comes to €/Gb and very low access times (2ms and such), very high transfer rates and so on...Is there a reason why are they not being used for simming? They must kill in performance...

[cgbart 7]

Hi Word Not Allowed,Actually I posted about a friend last year who built a i7 920 not for FS but as a general purpose machine for everything. As he is an IT pro, his rig contains a SAS raid setup for testing and fun! I challenged him to put FSX demo on the machine just to get a feel for its frame-rate and fluidity. With all settings maxed, we were running smooth as silk. The specifics on his box are as follows: 2 Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 15000 RPM SAS-1.0 3-GB/s 146-GB Hard Drive ST3146356SS running on an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution v.1 (not v.2 because of lack of SAS support) with Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS RTL 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s as a third drive. 6gb corsair DDR3 1600 and a Sapphire radeon 4850x2 all on Windows 7 extreme 64bit. I can get more info if anyone expresses interest...but yes, at least one person does see the benefit of SAS.

[Kosta 122]

I'd definitely have some interest into this. The question which here poses for me, does it pay off, compared to SSD? SSD is yes faster in access time and so on, but you get me SSD with 300GB for the same price as SAS drives...My question would be: what do you need for it? Does the cheapest controller do the work? Can you run standalone drive? Is it faster than VRap? Or just marginally?

[Guest jahman]

very low access times (2ms and such)

Intel X25-E Extreme SSD read latency (there is no "seek" in an SSD): 0.075 mSec (75 microSec) i.e. 27x faster!Six internal SSDs 35% faster than 24 15KRPM SAS HDDs, according to Intel.Cheers,- jahman.

[Kosta 122]

I know that there are no seek times. BUT - the price pro GB for SSD is ridiculous. Compare that to SAS and you'll see what I mean.