I'm not looking for specs

Post #200,216 by jbrabeck 3/23/05 8:09:23 PM Reply	I'm not looking for specs But personal experiences from those who have used both. I have used SCSI for years. I know nothing about SATA drives. Before I make an upgrade decision, I'd like to find out what the collective WE knows. Thanks, Joe A good friend will come and bail you out of jail ... but, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "Damn...that was fun!"
Post #200,224 by drewk 3/23/05 8:21:15 PM Reply	IIRC that's IGM, btw, OK? === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #200,240 by jbrabeck 3/23/05 9:29:09 PM Reply	Thank you. I knew we had a TLA for it. couldn't thunk it. A good friend will come and bail you out of jail ... but, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "Damn...that was fun!"
Post #200,228 by Another Scott 3/23/05 8:36:07 PM Reply	SATA is nice. The cables are very thin and easy to connect, unlike the wide IDE ribbons and fingerbusting HD power cables. You don't have the cable length issues that old SCSI drives had, and the termination issues are taken care of too. SATA CD-ROM drives can be problematic because not all SATA controllers support ATAPI over SATA. That is, your SATA controller will probably work fine with a SATA hard drive, but may not work with a new Plextor CD-RW SATA drive. See, e.g., [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=182506\|#182506]. I don't know if SATA does the magical scatter-gather type stuff that SCSI's done for years or not. Some googling would answer that. I'm a big fan of SCSI, but it's hard for me to justify the expense these days. I've become a fan of RAID mirrors and lots of hard drive space. The biggest SCSI drive I have is a 36 GB Ultra2 drive on a TekRAM controller; my biggest SATA drive is 160 GBx2 RAID mirror. It's easy to see what I've bought more recently. There may be some OS considerations as well. If you want to do SATA RAID you might have some issues with Linux using the common motherboard controllers. I would use the money you've budgeted for SCSI for a RAID mirror and/or more RAM and/or an external FireWire or USB2 HD rack or something like that instead. Unless, of course, you need 15k RPM drives or the like. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.
Post #200,231 by broomberg 3/23/05 8:37:32 PM Reply	Here ya go I've used SCSI and Fibre Channel drives for years. I've wasted a few moments here and there with IDE. SATA is NOT IDE. Combine SATA drives with a decent 3Ware controller and they will outperform almost anything. Their native streaming read rate is about 20% faster than FC, while their seek time is a bit less, which a good caching controller will "wash" out. My Bonnie++ tests showed my dual opteron with 6 SATA disks and a 3ware controller outperforming every other system in my computer room, including some 3 year old high-end FC gear. When I then tested against my brand-new EMC CX700 with stacks of 140GB FC drives, I found that the 3ware SATA controller was a bit slower for writes, a LOT faster for reads, and a bit slower for seeks. But this merely meant it wrote a measly 300MB (that's megaBYTES per second) while reading at around 170MB per second. As compared to the EMC writing 380MB per second and reading 100MB per second. I started running multiple tests at the same time, and found the degradation to be very graceful. I will very happily use SATA for the majority of my work in the future. The only reason I don't have it now was the EMC CX700 using FC disks was cheaper than the IBM using SATA, plus more heads is better for seeking. Also, I got 2 CX700s, which meant 4 times the FC <-> switch connections. If I bought the IBM it would be a single system with a measly 4 wires coming out. Right now my home PC uses 250GB SATA disks. I NEVER feel like I'm waiting on IO.
Post #200,241 by jbrabeck 3/23/05 9:29:40 PM Reply	Thanks Barry, Just what I was looking for. A good friend will come and bail you out of jail ... but, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "Damn...that was fun!"

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