[olug] new SATA drive

[Will Langford]

There's a new generation of the WD Raptor SATA drive out.

Given the discussion a month or two ago concerning SATA vs SCSI, it might be
an interesting alternative, albeit still a bit pricey (new and all).

Anandtech's take on the drive:

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2690

Sadly, they don't go into DB/server applications ... nor do they compare the
drive with SCSI counterparts... but it is nice to see, none the less.

StoreageReview's take:
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_1.html

Here they compare it with some SCSI drives, and the results are a bit
mixed.  Generally SCSI is still trouncing it, but it's improvements have
come a good way.  The I/O per second is still atrocious (roughly half of
decent SCSI drives)... so... meh.  A quote from the article:

"Unencumbered with the concern of delivering blazing
desktop<http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_11.html#>performance
and featuring time tested, mature command queuing
implementations, these offerings from Seagate,
Maxtor<http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_11.html#>,
Fujitsu, and Hitachi all significantly outdistance the WD1500 under even the
lightest of concurrent loads."

My serious question about all of it is the "do SATA drives lie about data
actually being on the platter" bit.  There are regular/PATA IDE drives that
lie to the host computer about data actually being written to the platter or
not, and has been discussed on the Postgres mailing list and such.
Obviously such practices are atrocious and instantly invalidate a drive for
critical stuff.....

I'd love to see the ability to use SATA in an environment that doesn't
require breakneck speeds.

-Will