Tracy R Reed wrote:
Gus Wirth wrote:
Not yet.
But the price/performance is still far better with SATA. I usually
recommend using more less expensive SATA disks rather than one or two
SCSI disks. In the end you usually get better performance and more
reliability through mirroring.
Depends on what your application is. If all you care about is
price/performance, a PIC microcontroller throws out more MIPS/dollar
than any x86 processor, but it doesn't mean you can do anything
resembling general PC computing with it. Although I agree that for
general PC and server use the lower cost SATA drives are the way to go.
You also have to be careful when evaluating reliability. There are a lot
of things that go into determining reliability figures. Hard drive
failures are only a small portion of the overall figure for reliability
for a computer. In particular, even if your drives are mirrored you are
only protected against a small subset of single drive failures where the
failure mode is non-catastrophic to other parts of the system. If a
drive fails by shorting the +12 to the +5 volt supply (this is highly
unlikely) it could take just about everything else with it rendering the
mirror useless.
One of the biggest problems in determining reliability of anything is
getting a history of the item. As I've mentioned before, all the MTBF
(Mean Time Before Failure) you see on computer hardware are just guesses
because the hardware product cycle is somewhere near 9 months, much
shorter than the expected MTBF. So there isn't enough data collected to
verify the estimates, and there is no economic incentive to do anything
about it.
Gus
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