I thought fibre channel was the serial implementation for SCSI. Why do we need another one (SAS)?

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That's a fair question. There were a great many suppliers of disks that are installed in servers that never switched to fibre channel primarily because the components were a little more expensive than parallel SCSI; also, SCSI was on the motherboard, and fibre channel wasn't. Because of that cost differential, those vendors wanted a less expensive serial implementation that was high-performance (and, therefore, not serial ATA), and they developed serial-attached SCSI, or SAS. So, it's primarily a price issue, as the implementation is a little cheaper than fibre channel; but SAS is more limited in distance and performance.

This was first published in November 2004

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