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Consider the loyal manual car buyer. Twenty years ago, driving a stick shift made sense: manual cars were often cheaper and got better gas mileage. But now that automatic car technology has caught up, manual car sales are dwindling.2 When looking for a new car, the manual car driver might catch themselves eyeing an automatic that’s just as affordable, with superior gas mileage to boot. They might start to wonder: Am I limiting myself with a technology that could become obsolete?
Data center technology evolves even more rapidly. What made sense financially five years ago or even two years ago may no longer be the best option today. Take SATA SSDs, which have had the same transfer speeds of 6Gb/s since 2008.3
RM5 Series value SAS SSDs deliver a 12Gb/s connection, and CD5 Series data center NVMe SSDs push transfer speeds to 32 gigatransfers per second (GT/s).4 In our testing, both drives from KIOXIA delivered better transactional database performance per dollar than the enterprise SATA SSDs we tested.
SATA SSDs may have served your business well in the past. But your needs have changed, and so has data center technology. Like the manual car owner switching to automatic, it’s time to consider what lies beyond SATA.
The Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd offers strong database performance with a variety of storage configuration options, and can support up to 24 SATA, SAS, or NVMe drives.5
2 Eric Evarts, “Why Are Manual Transmissions Disappearing?”, accessed October 4, 2019, https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/best-cars-blog/2016/09/why-are-manual-transmissions-disappearing.
3 The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), which describes itself as “an independent, non-profit organization developed by and for leading industry companies” (“About SATA-IO,” accessed October 4, 2019, https://sata-io.org/about-sata-io), last announced a dou-bling of maximum transfer speeds on SATA (from 3Gp/s to 6Gp/s) in August 2008. “New SATA Spec Will Double Data Transfer Speeds to 6 Gb/s,” accessed October 4, 2019, https://sata-io.org/system/files/member-downloads/SATA_6Gb_Phy_PR_Finalv2.pdf.
4 KIOXIA, “Life After SATA,” accessed October 4, 2019, https://business.kioxia.com/en-us/ssd/life-after-sata.html#value-sas.
5 Dell EMC, “Dell EMC R740xd spec sheet,” accessed October 4, 2019, http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/ Documents/poweredge-r740xd-spec-sheet.pdf?newtab=true.