with MINISAS ports cost about the same as the ones

Each MINISAS lane runs at 3 or 6Gbit/s (12Gbit/s in the future), and each 4-lane Mini-SAS port has four such lanes.  Thus an array with a 4-lane 6Gbs MiniSAS connection has a theoretical maximum throughput of 24Gbs!  In real life, the throughput will be limited by host adapter and drives' performance; for 8 drives in RAID5, read speeds can exceed 1GB/s, with write speeds at or above.  Compare that to under  with an eSATA 300 connection,  with Ultra320 SCSI, and- with 4GHz FC-AL.Value: storage enclosures with MINISAS SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 ports cost about the same as the ones with eSATA ports.  HBAs or Host Bus Adapters - controllers without RAID logic, cost about.  RAID controllers vary, and as of today, a suitable and very fast 8-lane ATTO ExpressSAS R680 RAID controller is listed at $1,095.  This is quite comparable to SCSI and (e)SATA, and is significantly less expensive than FC-AL.

A Fibre-Optical array is approximately more expensive than a MINISAS one: the RAID controller usually resides in the enclosure and adds with maximum about $2000 to it, and the FC-AL HBA (Host Bus Adapter) residing in the computer is anywhere from depending on the number of ports and their flavors - thus offsetting the price of a SAS RAID controller.TE's MINISAS receptacle assembly is the next-generation SAS high-density and high-speed IO interface. This interface was adopted for the SAS 2.1 standard and proposed for SAS 3.0 standard, and is designed to support 6G and future 12G SAS applications. The assembly is offered in 4x, 8x, and 16x versions.