What the hell are SAS hard drives?

I hadn't heard of these until yesterday when I was pricing out a server. Apparently they are SCSI drives with a serial interface A.K.A. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). All the benefits of SCSI with the small cable size of SATA. In fact the two interfaces are very similar and it's at least theoretically possible to run a SATA drive on a SAS interface. The reason is that SATA is essentially using SCSI commands already, but designed for only one device per port. SAS can be cascaded for up to 128 devices per port. The connectors are the same as you can see in the picture.

This would be great in a laptop since they are making SAS drives in the 2.5" format but with 10,000 rpm spindle speeds. Mostly these are being used in blade servers and such and not in laptops yet because power usage would kill a battery quick.

TiVo, TiVo, wherefore art thou, Tivo!

TiVo, I love you, but what the hell is wrong with you? How can it possibly take this long to come up with a dual tuner, cable card compatible box with a freaking optical audio out? That's all I want. Something that works with my digital cable signal and gives me full 5.1 surround sound when it's available. It doesn't even have to be dual tuner, I'll deal with recording one thing at a time.

Instead you take years to come out with a dual tuner verison of the same thing. Wow, I'm really impressed. To be fair it may not be your fault, who knows what the cable companies are doing to prevent your success but still, your definitely dragging ass here.

While your out there making nifty software like TiVo2go I'm stuck in DVR hell with the box that Charter shoved down my throat. It's hot in here TiVo. I want you back.

Update: Well would you look at that, TiVo might have actually listened!