This is not really true. SAS is for IOPS and SATA is for capacity and linear reads and writes. So any software turning
random I/O into sequential I/O and doing some sort of the overprovisioning can do magic for particular types of the workloads.
Think about Virsto and their vLog and vSpace concepts, think about VMware VSAN and all writes coming to flash for coalescing
and dumping to spindles later with a few writes, think about A. keeping writes in RAM for as long as they can and synchronizing
RAM and spindle with a huge delay and again with a sequential access entirely. That's for performance. For reliability - strong
checksums at file system level (ZFS) redundancy (LVM, RAID-Z, hardware RAIDs) do protect from a silent data corruption on
SATA just fine.
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Disk quality (no magical software will make SATA disks enterprise grade)