Synology launches SAS drives to beef up their range of enterprise drives
By
Synology launches SAS drives to beef up their range of enterprise drives
Following the launch of their HAT5300 SATA drives in January this year, Synology is following this up with three more 3.5-inch drives in the same 8TB, 12TB, and 16TB capacities.
Unlike the SATA drives that the company said were for businesses wanting “high-performance and maximum reliability”, Synology is saying that these will deliver the performance their UC and SA enterprise-level storage arrays need.
NAS reliability has been under scrutiny recently with WD NAS drives being hit by a series of mysterious data deletions.
Using SAS to deliver performance for mission-critical workloads
By leveraging the SAS protocol, Synology HAS5300 drives allow customers to scale up to 180 drives on the high-performance Synology SA series or to maximise iSCSI system availability with the dual controller setup on the UC3200 active-active IP SAN.
With support for 550 TB/year workloads and rated for 2.5 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), the HAS5300 SAS drives deliver consistent performance in the most intense environments. Persistent write cache technology further helps ensure data integrity for mission-critical applications. The drives also support fast data transfer for data-intensive configurations.
These figures aren’t actually far off those for the HAT5300 series. Which we found strange given that SAS drives were meant to perform better than SATA drives. When we asked Synology this, they replied that MTTF is more related to design and materials on hardware. Both SATA and SAS are protocols for HDD, so the protocol type won't affect MTTF. So the same MTTF of HAT5300 and HAS5300 is just a coincidence.
And as for the transfer rates, Synology said that the transfer rates wouldn’t be different if we compared one SATA HDD to a SAS HDD. The transfer rates difference happens when the HDDs are used in different scenarios, the company said.
Firmware updates for the HAS5300 drive will be shipped together with Synology's DiskStation Manager 7.0 (DSM) operating system that was launched this month.
Pricing and availability
Synology did not release any pricing for the HAS5300 drives only saying that they have a five-year warranty and are available now from Synology distributors in Singapore. For comparison, the HAT5300 8TB and 12TB drives were priced at S$379 and S$559 respectively, while the price of the 16TB was available on enquiry.
