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SATA vs SCSI


Guest cgotti

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I am going to be building a Windows 2003 server and not real sure which type of hard drives to go with. I would like to get your guys opinions on these two types of drives and what the pros and cons are for each one. Thanks in advance.
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How much space are you looking to have on your machine? Also, how badwidth intinsive will this be? How many computers will you be serving?

Personally I use sata for boot and standard ide for the other drives just to save cash. Also, are you wanting to use raid, and what array if you are?

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SCSI, and get a real RAID controller, not a software RAID for speed. RAID's will have a higher throughput speed as the number of drives increases. I just tested my setup to prove this to someone, I have 13 9 GB drives sitting on a Pentium Pro (Quad Processor) with 512 mb ram. I copied a 400 MB file on the raid and on to a server running a single 120 GB SATA drive, we then copied the file to another machine and timed it both from my RAID and his SATA server (his had a 1GB of RAM and a 2 GHz processor (10X faster than mine) I still beat his server for file transfer time by 10 seconds. Reason is that the bottleneck on reading and writing drives is the rate that the data goes to and comes off the actual disk. The electronics has the bandwidth to move the data 100X faster than the drives can write it to the disks. So when you are reading from or writing to a number of disks, they all share the data, a bit gets put on each one. So it happens faster, and remember, I ahve old assed 200Mhz processors in my server, the RAID card does the striping of the data, but it's old too.

Is SCSI expensive, yes and no. Yuo can buy 50 GB SCA drives on Ebay for less than $50 shipped. RAID controllers, that are LVD or SCSI320 are reasonable, less than $50 in many cases. Only draw back is that if you stirpe with a RAID 5, which uses Parity, it slows it a bit and you loose a bit of the total capacity, but if one drive fails, you power down (unless you have a server that supports hot swap like mine does) and you change the bad drive. The data is never lost, there is no recovering from tape or any of that crap. And you can continue running with a failed drive if you need to. If a SATA single drive fails, it's just gone, and your data is to unless you are backing up.

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Wow, you are still alive.

Back to the raid stuff.

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html if you want to explore all the raid option

pending what motherboard you have, if it has a built in raid controler, i would use that and the dricves it can support, unless you ned for spee really dictates something more.

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Whatever you get make sure the raid controller is on a seperate channel than the rest of the devices in the system ie: get a real server board. Even if you have a seperate raid controller, if its on the same 32 bit bus as the rest of the components it will slow your shit down. Get the scsi and go with raid 5 the extra expense isnt to rough and there are some great deals on ibm/hitachi drives right now.
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depends on how good of a sever you want sata is kindaa half assing it for a sever scusi would be going all out and doing it (the right way) but if it's just a light sever i'd prob. buy a SATA. SCSI is alot better though, not quite in porpotion on how much more money though,
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It all depends on what you want to do with the disk. If you're serving files and want just a bunch of disk space, SATA is going to be on point because the disks are a lot larger and cheaper. Most systems also have the controller for the drive built right in from the start now as well. If you're doing some kind of transaction processing or highly I/O dependant operations then the extra spend for the SCSI ( or fibre-channel ) solution is possibly worth the money in the long run. As for the 'get a SAN' suggestion you still end up back at the original question basically. Do you populate your frame with SATA or Fibre disks? What type of setup is the host going to use to recieve the LUN's, etc.

 

More information on the application would be helpful.

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