[olug] SATA Drives

[Carl Lundstedt]

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.
>
>   
We currently have about 120 TB of disk (around 300 drives) on the floor, 
all SATA based.  Some are in SCSI enclosures, some are in 3U storage 
servers with 12 drive 3ware cards, a few are in a fiber enclosure and a 
small minority are located in 1U servers.  We lose around a drive a 
week.  The majority of our usage is large file size read/writes to SATA 
RAID arrays, but we do have SATA disk RAID arrays running on our 3U, 
3ware based NFS server (which get hammered by all kinds of usage) and 
SATA drives standing alone in our database servers.

I'll regret saying this, I'm sure, but I don't recall having lost a SATA 
disk out of our 1U database servers, and our NFS arrays seem to have far 
less failures than our large file storage servers.  This may just be an 
illusion of scale since we have far more storage servers than NFS servers.
 
We do only use the raid edition drives, we do not accept bids with 
standard desktop drives (although, I guess, we have a couple scattered 
through the cluster for logs and archives).

For cost per GB I have no idea why you wouldn't go with SATA in a 
RAID'ed system.

Carl Lundstedt
UNL