The core component of an array card is, of course, the array card chip (also known as the "array controller chip"). Just like network cards and graphics cards, they each have their central chips. Currently, the main providers of RAID controller card chips are companies such as HighPoint, Promise (JoyoTek), and AMI. The chips produced by these companies can be found on both control cards and server motherboards. Among the three major interfaces currently available, SATA offers the best cost-performance ratio. Disks with this type of disk interface are priced similarly to the commonly used parallel ATA interface disks in PCs (only about 15% more expensive), and SATA interface devices have advantages such as fewer cables, longer transmission distance per cable, support for hot swapping, lower energy consumption, and less heat dissipation, making them very suitable for high-density, large-scale enterprise storage systems. Compared to SCSI interfaces, SATA interface disks have a more obvious price advantage. However, due to the relatively lower rotational speed of current SATA disks compared to SCSI disks that can generally reach 15,000 RPM, there is still a significant gap in performance, meaning that SATA products currently cannot compete with SCSI and cannot meet the storage application needs for critical data. However, the read/write performance of the first generation of SATA disks has already reached 150Mb/s, which is faster than the fastest ATA standard of 133Mb/s, and the soon-to-be-released second generation SATA will have a storage speed of up to 300Mb/s, comparable to the current fastest SCSI standard Ultra320. It is reported that the third generation will even reach 600Mb/s, far exceeding the 480Mb/s rate of the next-generation SCSI standard, offering a broad development prospect. Moreover, the single-disk capacity of SATA is much higher than that of SCSI, currently reaching over 250GB, so a disk array system can provide several TBs of capacity space. Integrating such equipment into an enterprise multi-level storage system will bring significant cost advantages to users while ensuring capacity requirements and improving data access efficiency. Additionally, NCQ (Native Command Queue) technology has been added to new SATA products. NCQ technology allows the disk to intelligently reorganize and establish the optimal read/write command execution order, minimizing the mechanical positioning delay of the disk and improving the execution efficiency of workload queues. As SATA technology develops, more new technologies will be integrated, gradually bringing its performance closer to or even surpassing that of SCSI disks. With such high performance, low price, and promising development prospects, it is undoubtedly the best choice for market customers, and it will quickly replace low-end SCSI disks. Due to its excellent cost-performance ratio, SATA will gradually dominate the secondary and tertiary storage markets. Meanwhile, because of its affordable price, small and medium-sized enterprises can invest in building SAN systems and fully enjoy the benefits brought by SAN systems. Furthermore, embedding data service software in FC-SATA arrays can significantly reduce the capital investment for small and medium-sized enterprises in configuring, managing SANs, and maintaining data.
Original source: Hefei Server Data Recovery Center: http://www.ahserver.com/plus/view-78-1.html