Difference between FC and SAS Disk ?

Question

May I ask a silly question - What is the difference between a FC and SAS Disk ?

It appears they are different as EMC VNX doesn't support FC drives. What is the difference between them (Like: Speed) ?

Besides, does FC in VNX means the way we access the SAN (i.e. Block Level) ?

Thanks

Message was edited by: TonyJK

Rainer_EMC · Answer

Thats just the interface that the disk is connected to the storage processor

It has not relation to what the SP is offering to SAN clients.

You can do FC, ISCSI, FcoE with either FC, SATA or SAS disks.

The VNX only uses SAS disks – but there are two classes

Regular SAS disks with 10k/15k rpm that are faster but smaller and more expensive

And NL-SAS (nearline SAS) which are 7.2k rpm – bigger, cheaper and and slower

I would suggest to look at the VNX performance fundamentals on Powerlink

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/h1094_Unified_Storage_Fundamentals.pdf

Rainer

VNX