There are a lot of SATA RAID (0/1/5) options. Example: http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata.asp
SATA is good for high performance, low-end servers, but you would never want to attempt a big RAID-10 rack with SATA. Actual throughput speeds of SCSI/160 drives (10K or 12K RPM) are still twice as fast as the fastest SATA drives. Although SATA is technically capable of 150 throughput, the drives are cheaper and slower, so you're punching data in and out of the on-board cache at that speed, which will help a desktop perform well, but for constant writes on a high-volume server, you're not going to get better performance than if you just use ATA/133. SCSI also goes up to SCSI 320 and SCSI 640, and SCSI has protocols that allow you to shut down and replace a drive without interrupting operation. SCSI/640s are used in high-end machines (e.g. nCube or IBM-900/990) where data is flying on and off the drives faster than most PC's can access memory. Reliability is also a big issue, and a lot of money goes into these drives to insure they will never fail. I've never even heard of an IBM 900-series SCSI 320 or 640 drive failing. If it has happened, IBM has done a good job of covering it up, or maybe I've been lucky. Certainly SCSI is not the best economic choice for a desktop workstation, but people that like to play games on PC's that have more computing power than even existed on the entire Earth before 1980 will do strange things. Here's something else-- if you crack open the latest Maxtor 300 Gig drive and compare it with the latest Maxtor 250 gig drive (of the same line), you'll find that there's not a lot of difference between the two. Yet one costs much more than the other. That's what happens when the engineering and marketing departments get together to plan deployment strategies. Keith > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matt > Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 9:21 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Raid Controller > > Has anyone thought about serial ATA? I don't see any reason > why someone can't build a high quality RAID controller to use > these drives, and it appears that they are building high > quality drives for serial ATA. A friend told me there was at > least one such card on the market already, though I forget > what it was. > > If you ask me, SCSI is an overpriced racket. [AUTOMATED NOTE: Your mail server [63.147.33.8] is missing a reverse DNS entry. All Internet hosts are required to have a reverse DNS entry. The missing reverse DNS entry will cause your mail to be treated as spam on some servers, such as AOL.] --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
