- Higher Performance per U of Rack Space : the Serialised nature of SAS combined with the highest spindle count per U of rack space allows the MSA50 to achieve the greatest I/Os per second when compared to parallel SCSI
- Price Sensitivity : the MSA50 will be the first SAS/SATA SFF JBOD product that will offer a level of availability sufficient for the Enterprise and a price structure that is attractive to SMB
- Investment Protection : the MSA50 has the future potential to upgrade from 3GB to 6GB SAS, as well as mix and match SAS or SATA drives within the same enclosure. Thus making technology transitions simple and cost effective
- Reduced Spares Inventory : universal SFF drives and similar physical characteristics between SAS and SATA drives allow customers to mix/match SAS and SATA in the same enclosure and allow the same drives to be used in servers and external storage
The HP Modular Smart Array 50 Enclosure MSA50 is a 1U Serial Attach SCSI(SAS) disk drive storage enclosure supporting Small Form Factor (SFF) SAS or Serial ATA (SATA) drives. This enclosure delivers industry-leading data performance, availability, storage density, and upgradeability to meet customers' demanding and growing storage needs. The all new SFF drive carrier is designed to support the new Universal form factor hard drive in either SAS, SAS MDL or SATA. This new form factor provides optimized performance per U of space while delivering unparalleled power consumption. The MSA50 enclosure supports direct attach storage to HP ProLiant and Integrity Servers. The MSA50 supports the cascading of shelves in a 1+1 configuration to allow a maximum of 20 SFF drives in a 2U configuration attached to a single controller port. This single controller port incorporates four lanes for a total max throughput of 12Gb/s for SAS.