"Scott M. Grim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 12/05/2005 16:42:00:
> I've fairly extensively (although not necessarily scientifically) tested
> SATA 150 vs. SCSI U320 and find that if you're doing a lot of random
reads
> and writes (such as with a database server), SCSI provides nearly 5x the
> performance as SATA so, for us, it's well worth the additional expense.
>
> It's also my experience that even the best SATA drives seem to be
> disposable. There's a huge difference in reliability and life
expectancy
> between SATA and SCSI drives because they put a bit more quality into
SCSI
> drives as they are expected to perform in an enterprise environment.
>
> With RAID arrays and hotswap bays, it's easy enough to deal with SATA's
> unreliability, but it's always best to not have to swap and rebuild
because
> every failure has the potential to cause some cascade that can become
> devestating.
I would concur with this. Having talked to drive manufacturers, they use
the Scsi interface, which is not in itself significantly faster than Sata,
as a marker for what you might call "Professional grade" drives.
Components such as bearings etc. are built to a higher spec, head
actuators are more powerful, buffers are bigger, more effort is put into
optimising the drive's internal code to do better overlapping, there are
more self diagnostics etc.
As is usually true, you pay for what you get. While there might be a
slight element of gouge in it, SATA drives are basically consumer-grade
drives with a fast interface, which SCSI drives are what the manufacturers
think of as professional grade. What are the warranties and MTBF on the
SATA drives like? A year or so ago, the manufacturers drastically cut the
warranties on their ATA drives, without changing the SCSI. Where to SATA
fall in this spectrum?
Alec
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