Serial technologies include SAS hard drives (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA hard drives (Serial ATA) - with better RAS performance than older Intel Xeon servers. When storage environments need to simplify configuration or optimize cost/capacity, SATA, designed for desktop applications, is ideal, while SAS provides the high performance, high scalability required for mainstream servers and enterprise storage with higher bandwidth requirements sturdiness and reliability. SAS addresses the need for high-frequency and immediate, random data access in transactional data application environments such as online shopping and banking transactions.

SAS combines the reliability and power of SCSI with the performance and design of serial technology to give us the following key features and capabilities:

1. Performance: The performance of the first generation product reaches 3Gbps, wide port composite bandwidth, full-duplex transmission, port aggregation, advanced command queue combination, rich SCSI command function group

2. Scalability: wide addressing range for physical devices, long cables, small connectors, and access to external storage systems

3. Reliability and availability: point-to-point connection, multi-server (initiators) concurrent access through expanders, support for dual active ports and redundant paths for target devices

4. Flexibility: Physically and software compatible with SAS and SATA hard drives, and backward compatible with SCSI software and middleware