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.