SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is a computer bus technology primarily designed for transfer of data to and from computer data storage devices such as hard drives, CD-ROM… It is a replacement for parallel SCSI. It is also backwards-compatible with SATA drives. It uses serial communication instead of the parallel method but still uses SCSI commands.

SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) vs parallel SCSI

• The SAS bus is point-to-point while the SCSI bus is multidrop.
• SAS has no termination issues and does not require terminator packs like parallel SCSI.
• SAS supports a higher transfer speed (1.5, 3.0 or 6.0 Gbit/s).
• SAS can supports up to 16,384 devices.

Tags: desktop, hard drive, SAS, SCSI, server