back to article Who dares wins, they say, so Toshiba's SAS drive plans another hit on SATA

Toshiba has sent in a SAS SSD hit team to assault SATA SSDs and their slower interface in the shape of its RM5 vSAS drive. It has priced the drive at SATA levels, referring to it as a vSAS drive, where "v" is for value. OK. SATA interface speeds of 6Gbit/s are not good enough for servers, and cheaper SAS should, Toshiba said, …

  1. Bronek Kozicki

    I will have eight such disks, please

    free samples for test purposes, of course.

  2. TonyJ

    Perfect for my home lab

    Assuming they:

    a) Are priced reasonably (and around SATA levels) and

    b) My ProLiant doesn't think they're overheating and ramp all the sodding fans up to the point the box sounds like it's trying to take off*

    *Purely down to HP that one. Even genuine HP Gen8 carriers aren't always sufficient. TBH, if the server hadn't been such a steal on FleaBay I'd probably have gone down the route of another vendor / white box.

    1. Packet

      Re: Perfect for my home lab

      Your local hydro must love you for the giant power bills that thing racks up

    2. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: Perfect for my home lab

      We had a bunch of what were supposed to be (and looked like) genuine HP Gen8 caddies, but the drives we put in them were never detected. Which is odd because there doesn't seem to be much in the way of electronics in them. Complaining to the seller got a new batch which looked identical, but did work.

  3. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    Pricing is sort of important here..

    Companies are only using SATA SSDs because they're still quite fast and are much more competitively priced than SAS SSDs.

    Course, if Toshiba's SSD can't go way beyond saturating 6Gb/s and approach 12Gb/s they're unlikely to get anywhere.

  4. Joerg

    SATA 3.2 and 3.3 support 16Gbps

    SATA 3.2 and 3.3 support 16Gbps ... why manufacturers are still stuck at using 6Gbps only that is the big question. SATA 3.2 was published in 2013. After 5 years no SATA device either HDU or SSD is using the full 16Gbps bandwidth specification.

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: SATA 3.2 and 3.3 support 16Gbps

      "why manufacturers are still stuck at using 6Gbps only that is the big question."

      While an upgrade from a hard drive to an SSD will give a major boost, an upgrade from SATA SSD to NVME (or any faster bus) would be near imperceptible for most users. The power users would still select the NVME drives since the fastest drives are twice as fast as what SATA can offer.

      "SATA 3.2 was published in 2013. After 5 years no SATA device"

      There have been plenty of standards offering superior speed on paper. Why didn't e.g. Firewire 1600, ExpressCard 2.0, SCSI-640 etc materialize? Because they were based on obsolete technology, had near zero marketshare on a saturated market, had unacceptable license costs, or they just didn't serve a purpose anymore. There's always a chicken and egg situation with new products.

      1. Joerg

        Re: SATA 3.2 and 3.3 support 16Gbps

        SATA obsolete and a near zero marketshare ? WHAT ?

        1. Sandtitz Silver badge

          Re: SATA 3.2 and 3.3 support 16Gbps @Joerg

          "SATA obsolete and a near zero marketshare ? WHAT ?"

          Read it again Joerg. I'm talking about the 16Gbps revisions - the subject line in your message...

          SATA Express is dead.

          M.2 is popular with laptops and some desktops too, but either the drives are you regular SATA-3 drives or the NVMe drives. SATA @16Gbps is way below PCIe (NVMe) speeds so manufacturers haven't bothered to support this middle speed tier and extra design work - it's easier to just route M.2 SATA drives to the existing motherboard SATA circuitry.

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