Serial Attached SCSI speeds up to 12 Gbit/s. The physical SAS connector comes in several different variants: "Nearline SAS" (abbreviated to "NL-SAS", and sometimes called "midline SAS") drives have a SAS interface, but head, media, and rotational speed of traditional enterprise-class SATA drives, so they cost less than other SAS drives. When compared to SATA, NL-SAS drives have the following benefits: Serial Attached SCSI In computing, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a point-to-point serial protocol that moves data to and from computer-storage devices such as hard drives and tape drives. SAS replaces the older Parallel SCSI (Parallel Small Computer System Interface, usually pronounced
Parallel ATA as the "AT Bus Attachment," officially called "AT Attachment" and abbreviated "ATA" because its primary feature was a direct connection to the 16-bit ISA bus introduced with the IBM PC/AT. The original ATA specifications published by the standards committees use the name "AT Attachment". The "AT" in the IBM PC/AT referred to "Advanced Technology" so ATA has also been referred to as "Advanced Technology Attachment". When a newer Serial ATA (SATA) was introduced in 2003, the original ATA was renamed to Parallel ATA, or PATA for short. The first version of what is now called the ATA/ATAPI interface was developed