I have 8 WD SATA HDD with raid ready (3mbps) hard disks on a 8 port 3ware controller.(on raid 5.) Does anyone have a comparison on SATA raid and SAS raid disk. As you know SAS disk are very expensive and I would like to know from experts in the list who could suggest which of the following would be the best.

Option 1) 2 servers each having 2.0TB raid disk with SAS drives, 2GB ram and standard other features.

Option 2) 4 No servers with 1TB each with 2GB ram and standard other features.

If Data files (mostly AutoCAD Drawings of size 5MB to 50MB) are distributed as per the above options do you think which could perform better?. As you know the price of SATA disk is much cheaper than the SAS disk and we could nearly by 4 servers for that money.

Probability work disturbed by a server crash is low in the second case but I am not sure about the comparison on performance.

I would appreciate if you could spread some thought in this regards, and apologize if this is out of topic.

Best regards,

Rajeev