Csdrhrt

as a home user who uses Windows 10 Home Edition more than 90% of the time with a GTX970 and playing steam games what practical benefit would an economical SAS controller provide if any?

yes, I would reinstall win10 on a new SAS SSD

I am planning on rebuilding / modding my existing home pc (Asrock Extreme4) to be more work at home friendly and I want to support SAS, mainly 2.5" SAS SSD's and maybe 3.5" SAS HDD's if I can find trayless docks I like to make use of disks without having to open up pc case and without having to touch a screwdriver... I do a lot of linux stuff which will be on a separate disk, preferably an SSD and while usually SATA I want to be able to accommodate SAS.

SAS SSD faster than SATA SSD? True, SAS-3 has maximum interface speed double that of the SATA III standard.

However, an NVMe SSD will run rings around either, for it has four channels instead of just one.

The other answers commenting on the performance benefits of SAS over SATA are technically correct, but miss a couple of key points:

• Unless you are using SAS drives instead of SATA drives, you won't benefit from the increased bandwidth provided by SAS (because it has to run at the slower SATA speeds). While this is definitely an option, it's insanely expensive. Just a single good SAS drive plus a good SAS HBA is easily over 500 USD.


• Using a SAS HBA has a couple of other less immediately tangible benefits over SATA:
  
  
  
  
  • SATA adapters typically can only support a very limited number of storage devices. It's unusual to see a SATA adapter that supports more than 4 devices, and most motherboards support at most 8 (usually using multiple adapter chips on the board). SAS HBA's rarely support less than 16 devices, so they are a far more space efficient choice if you need a lot of storage devices.
  
  
  • A lot of SATA controllers have some pretty serious concurrency issues. In essence, the more drives you're accessing simultaneously through them, the slower all the drives will perform. This is most noticeable when transferring large amounts of data, especially if you're copying between disks. SAS HBA's rarely have these issues.
  
  
  • The cabling used with SAS hardware tends to be slightly more robust than your typical consumer hardware, simply because SAS is largely an enterprise thing.
  
  
  
  

Now, as to your specific use case, it probably isn't worth it. If you've got enough money to shell out on SAS hardware, you've got enough for a good NVMe drive which will outperform any SAS SSD you can find by such a large margin that it would really just be a waste of money to get SAS hardware.

The only two exceptions I would make to this are if you need a huge amount of storage (enough that you need multiple traditional hard drives), or you know you will actually need to work on SAS drives (which is seriously unlikely for a personal system).