Are you referring to SATA "Enterprise" drives like the WD RE series and the ES drives from Seagate -vs- "desktop" drives?
In my experience they do tend to be more reliable, but they also seem to have a much higher failure rate than good 'ol SCSI. 2 disk failure protection is absolutely required for any critical data on today's high capacity SATA disks. See http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162 for a good (and controversial) writeup of the issue. RS From: Linda C Jones [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 10:01 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Drobo Pro I think, BTW, if anyone is considering any type of Drobo, take a look at the SCSI drives therein. We opted not to take the inexpensive drives sold with the Drobo, but to purchase more robust drives, since the things would be used as backup for servers. It doesn't cost that much more. Of course, the big plus for Drobos is that you can replace a failed drive on the fly and it will automatically rebuild, but that didn't seem to me to justify less reliable drives. Linda Eric E Eskam wrote: Linda C Jones <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]> wrote on 05/17/2009 09:38:48 PM: > Using the plain old Drobos for backup in a couple of cases. They are > quite simple to use -- meant for end-users. Yup, I have one of the four slot units at home to keep all my photography and video on and I love it. The pro is eight slots and it supports iSCSI. Seems like a perfect external array for a small business environment - especially if I can boot off of it. I hate direct attached storage - our iSCSI SAN has me spoiled :) Eric Eskam =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The contents of this message are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government "The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it." - P. B. Medawar ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
