Hitachi Ultrastar model HUS or HUA?

I've recently discovered there are two ultrastar models, the HUA (sata) or HUS (sas). I'll be using an Atto R680 to control the mini sas tower.

- Does it matter which ultrastar model I use?
- And can I mix HUA and HUS within the same RAID?

Is performance the only difference? And how big a difference are we talking, specifically when working with multiple layers of 2k video?

I've come to the same question. The HUS drives are cheaper, the HUA drives are better.

I use the same sas raid system (sonnet R800) and the same software (atto) to control it. The HUA drives work perfect for two years now. Don't mix the drives! If you look at the sonnet site for specs, you can only use the HUA ones, the HUS are not listed.

I hope this helps

Rainer

Bob, I'm very aware of the pre-made products available through and endorsed not only by this site, but specifically by you. Your responses are quite often the broken record of replies. Right now, those aren't the solutions that best suit my particular situation. Which is why I presented the question. And please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't what these types of sites are for? A pool of gleanable knowledge that help people find solutions and answers for their particular situations.

The next time I'm looking for a product solution, I'll just type your name in and read from the valuable pool of endorsements. In the mean time, perhaps a deep breath and a walk might be good solution for you.

-cheers

[Jon Schilling] "The SAS drives are going to give you the better performance."

This isn't really true. The underlying spindle isn't any faster and the vendor themselves will tell you the SAS front in (dual ported) is really for redundancy.

That being said, I think there might be a slight increase in performance if you had a dual ported SAS backplane and two channels driving it. Theoretically, you could see some better pipelining.

(We've tested this BTW. The drives perform the same in a non-dual ported environment. There is no latency improvement)

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Rainer Wirth] "That is interesting. I've got a question to Steve. As you work for small tree, one of the best raid storage producers, you say, that it doesn't matter wether to use a HUA or HUS drive in a let's say 16 bay SAS or FC Raid. Which drives do you use in the small tree products. Do you list the HUS drives within your small tree specs?"

Hi Rainer

We use SATA drives. When you're doing video editing, it's not about the bandwidth benchmarks. It's about how many simultaneous streams you can sustain before the spindles can't keep up with the framerate. I'd love to have a SAS product that could handle more streams that I could sell for 4X the price. We've tried buying much faster raids to test against but they can't beat our stream counts.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications