LSI shows off S-ATA light of SASsy love

LSI WAS SHOWING OFF a bunch of toys at IDF, both SAS and S-ATA varieties. Sometimes it even mixed the two on the same card. As you know, a SAS adaptor can accept a S-ATA drive, but not the other way around. This can lead to some very interesting configurations.

The first goodie is an eight port S-ATA II RAID adapter, the MegaRAID SATA 300-8X. It plugs into a PCI-X slot and gives you eight SATA II ports, which, if you plug 8 4-port SATA multiplier into it, will bring you to 32 drives.

In a shocking turn of events, they were actually showing this card running with, wait for it, 32 S-ATA drives on it. The eight pretty red cables each go into a box you can't see, and 4 more little red cables come out of that. They run into the big black box that is sitting on top of the card, and connect to the drives in there.

Next up there is SAS, and SAS RAID adapters. This one is a four port adaptor, and as you can see, it uses an Infiniband physical connector to aggregate ports. Cheaper standard connectors means lower cost and quicker time to market.

The neat thing is when you combine the two, along with the SAS version of the S-ATA port multiplier, you get a lot of ports. You can have a lot more ports with SAS than S-ATA, so theoretically you can have more than 32 drives with four ports.

That is not the point though. The point is interoperability. Continuing my doe-eyed amazement as the theme for this year's fall IDF, it was the first time I had seen this setup at work. Yes, the techies connected several SAS drives and several S-ATA drives to the same adaptor. It works, and it will change enterprise storage. It doesn't look like much though, just more drives with more red cables. µ