Sorry for hi-jacking this thread, but it's very interesting. What's the difference, apart from the speed & price between SAS & SATAII?
SAS is more enterprise geared, relating to speed and MTBU (probably a load of crap on that point) and SATA is cheaper and does not perform as well, supposedly less reliable to.
SAS usually only come in higher spindle speeds and the 2.5" variety actually only have 300 Gb ratings.
SAS supports proper multiplexor technology, and multichannel bonding... a typical external SAS connector has FOUR sas channels, and the multiplexor in a drive chassis can connect any drive to any channel at any time, while SATA only supports simple expanders (1 channel to N drives). SAS understands NCQ natively, while this was a kludge added to SATA (and, from various field reports, not very well).