Excellent data point, a great example given recent EUGLUG threads ;) As for SCSI-vs-SATA, it strikes me that the enterprise swing to commodity clustering, thanks even to the biggest irons, have brought enterprise-grade engineering across to commodity formats. For example, many blades use 2.5" hard drives, which undergo similar extra testing and tend toward higher specs. You'll notice a gap in specs in 3.5" SATA drives too, I'm guessing the pro-sumer and commodity-shaped enterprise gear is becoming cheaper to produce identically/together. So we get a super-zippy and quite reliable high-end 1TB drive for about $350 from newegg.com now, with super- sales season coming. If only all the little boys and girls were good this year.
ben On Nov 16, 2007 2:49 PM, Quentin Hartman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > Anecdotal data point: My home server is running on a 1Ghz Via C3 processor. > I have a 3+1 software Raid 5 array in it. The processor is fast enough to > saturate a 100MB ethernet connection copying data off the drives over NFS, > but not over Gb. When I copy stuff via Gb, throughput is very bursty, but > probably averages out to about 400-500Mb / sec > > > > > > I have not seen the most recent benchmarks or fully examined the > > latest HA (high-avail) compromises, but SCSI is still much better that > > SATA (bye, PATA) for high-volume multithreaded uses needed for many > > email, DB, web, and other servers. > > I have been tracking this stuff pretty closely, so I'll throw another few > cents based on my experiences. I've found that SCSI's primary advantage over > SATA comes from access time and IOPs (I/O operations per second). Unless you > have a workload that specifically requires it, SCSI is generally not worth > the money, even in "important" servers for business. I've found that it ends > up being more economical to have several "cheap" SATA-based servers than one > big SCSI(or SAS) based server. Of course, there are cases where this is not > true; per server license costs can influence this as well as the > clusterability of whatever service or application you are running. I've > gotten to the point though that I tend to "cheap cluster" by default, and > only "big iron" when there are specific factors that make cheap cluster not > work. > > That being said, SCSI's edge over SATA isn't quite as thin as it seems on > paper, where even in areas like seek time and IOPs some SATA drives are > challenging SCSI. There are the intangibles. The firmware on SCSI drives > tends to be a little more conservative, and the drives tend to be tested to > somewhat higher standards. These two items combined lead to more reliable > drives. Another somewhat intangible advantage is that the hardware that > surrounds and supports SCSI drives tends to be higher quality than that > which is built to support SATA. This leads to an overall better experience. > All in all, SCSI still has quite a few advantages over SATA, but the simple > "it's just always better" is no longer true. > ... _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
