[olug] SATA Drives

[Will Langford]

On 8/9/07, Dave Thacker <dthacker9 at cox.net> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 09 August 2007 16:43, Curtis LaMasters wrote:
> > Some of they guy's in my company complain that SATA drives are worthless
> > and should NEVER be installed in a server platform.  I just wanted to
> know
> > your take on the situation.  My personal belief is match the server
> specs
> > to it's requirements.  Enough said.
>
> Last fall I attended an IBM SAN school for a week. (I have a DS4000 SAN at
> work).  The recommendation was "If you have large reads and writes
> occurring
> at a low to moderate frequency, then SATA is appropriate.  If you do many
> small reads and writes at a high frequency (think database) then stick
> with
> SCSI"
>
> DT



>From my experience with lots of individual servers, if you're needing speed,
go with a more enterprise based solution, otherwise, SATA should be just
fine.  Both sets of drives can run hot, so that arguement is out (I've had
both SATA and SCSI drives stop working for a lil while when left in a case
with no airflow over them).

In reguards to duty cycle / heavy usage, we've had some servers in the field
for about a year with a heavy duty cycle and they appear to be doing just
fine.  Granted a year is nothing in reguards to drive life, but it's good to
see that they're not dropping like flies.

Annnddd... if the data is important, it should be in some kind of
raid/back-up solution no matter what the make of the drive is.  Failures
happen no matter what.

SATA has it's place.  Workstations, commodity servers, storage farms, etc.

Note that our load is primarily database driven.