Serial Attached SCSI

SAS is a new SCSI standard that uses serial communication instead of parallel.

SAS standard provides full Serial ATA (SATA) compatibility. While SATA is targeted to desktop market (end users) SAS is targeted to the server market.

This standard provides a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 3 Gbps (300 MB/s) and can adopt a 6 Gbps (600 MB/s) transfer rate in the near future.
Its main advantage against Serial SCSI (Fibre Channel, FC) is that it allows several transmission rates to be used at the same time. On Fibre Channel if you have several devices with different transfer rates, the system operates at the lower speed rate, compromising the performance of the whole system.

SAS standard is hot swap, i.e. it allows you to exchange hard drives with the computer turned on.

Originally at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/dictionary/term/266

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