Question: I heard that the external SAS cables will have direction orientation. Can you explain why and will there be markings to let you know which way to go?

A quick word about a webinar that Steve Rogers and I gave last week…

All RAID-6 is not alike. There are pros and cons to each, but they all support two simultaneous drive failures. …

These backup services are quite convenient. It does require an Internet connection, which just about everyone has now.

…in my opinion this is a prime example of people being lazy or stupid!

The toughest question for any storage administrator to answer is, “What kind of performance do you NEED?”

There’s been lots of talk about RAID 6 as it compares to RAID 5 and the reliability benefits that are gained by SATA drives when using RAID 6 – so I’ve decided NOT to talk about that anymore!
Instead I thought I’d discuss two other RAID levels out there and available to folks. RAID 5EE […]

…I profess that, unequivocally, iSCSI has indeed changed the face of storage networking - forever!

Finally, a solution for low-volatility storage enclosures suffering from structural framework issues. …

For a long time now I’ve been a proponent of replacing tape drives with hard drives. But there have always been technical hurdles to overcome…

… how bad would SATA have been without the benefit of RAID-6? …

SAS ready for the Enterprise? Just how Big? and what about HA?

I’m not going to go into the values of having applications and services available over the web – I think that’s a personal preference for each individual and company to have to decide.

Storage Management in Rough Waters

Now that we know how to calculate the Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL) for RAID-5 and RAID-6 arrays, let’s take a look at some real life cases using actual SATA and SAS/SCSI arrays. …

It’s true I tell you – you can absolutely deploy SAS and SATA drives within the same physical enclosure… but be careful!

There are a number of ways that IT Pros deal with remote site data protection – some are good and some are not so good…

In an earlier post Joe mentioned that the reliability of SATA could be improved by using RAID-6. That’s very true, and there’s a good story to be told about the reliability of SATA with RAID-6 being much higher than the reliability of SCSI/SAS with RAID-5. So I thought I would start by reviewing how reliability is determined for both types of arrays. …

Finally these “third class citizens” (SATA drives) can get a little respect with a little help from RAID 6.

Byte and Switch poll: Is SAS a viable alternative to Fibre Channel as an enterprise-class drive?

SAS, RAID, Virtualization & Storage Management