Over the years we have tested nearly every size, shape and form of hard drive to hit the market. Everything from IDE to Serial ATA, and yes, even SCSI. Today, we begin writing a new chapter called Serial Attached SCSI or what is known as "SAS" interface hard drives. To most people the "new thing" is still SATA (Serial ATA) as it seems like it was just yesterday when we were testing the very first SATA hard drives. SATA is fast and we've proven that SATA can be just as fast or even faster than SCSI in RAID configurations compared to single SCSI drives. But what's next? Is there anything out there that promises the simplicity and economic advantages of SATA and at the same time deliver the speed and ultra reliability of SCSI? How about SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)? SAS technology has been around for a couple years, but is just now starting to catch on. Although SAS is intended to be a replacement for SCSI, SAS Technology is not and will not be limited to enterprise use only. Do I have your attention? Good, then read on!

As SAS technology promises to blow away both Serial ATA and SCSI performance, is it time to look towards an SAS solution for our next data center, workstation or even a ultra high end desktop upgrade? The answer is YES and this is why:

• SAS has no termination issues like SCSI.

• SAS eliminates clock skew.

• SAS supports up to 16,384 devices through the use of expanders while Parallel SCSI is limited to 8, 16, or 32 devices on a single channel. No, 16,384 is NOT a typo.

• SAS supports a higher transfer speed than Parallel SCSI and will double from 3.0 Gbit/s to 6.0 Gbit/s in 2009 and eventually hitting as high as 12 Gbit/s.

• SAS speed is realized on each initiator-target resulting in higher throughput compared to the speed of SCSI which is shared across the entire multidrop bus.

• SAS controllers are backwards compatible with SATA devices. This means SATA will most likely become obsolete and phased out over the next few years.

• SATA follows the ATA command set and only supports hard drives and CD/DVD drives. In theory, SAS will supports numerous other devices including scanners and printers, not just hard drives and optical drives.

With SAS promising to do so much for the entire computer industry, all of us here at Club Overclocker are very excited to see SAS performance first hand. Today is that day...  Today we get to find out as we take a hands-on look at Seagate's new generation of Cheetah hard drives. Yes, the same Cheetah drives that Seagate built their reputation on. Only this time the geniuses over Seagate have reworked the Cheetah and gave it an SAS interface. In the past if you want the fastest performance possible and at the same time you had to maintain rock solid reliability for mission critical data, the Cheetah was the only way to go. Let's see if Seagate can carry on this tradition with the all new Cheetah 15K.6 450GB SAS hard drive!