[TriLUG] SCSI vs. SATA in theory

[Jason Tower]

sata drives are not substantially different from traditional ide drives, 
they just have a different controller and interface.  the only 
exception that i know of are the wd raptors which are aimed at the 
enterprise market and cost about the same as scsi.

therefore, if reliability is truly a concern and you want to do the job 
right, then you really only have one option - scsi.  and since that 
isn't 100% foolproof, you still need backup of some sort.  use sata/ide 
for that purpose - dense, cheap, and if it fails you haven't lost 
anything.  but if reliability is the goal, stick with scsi.

jason

On Thursday 10 February 2005 14:32, Greg Brown wrote:
> Do mean time between failure rates between SCSI and SATA differ
> greatly in the field?  Most IDE drives seem to live 3-5 years under
> moderate use and I'm fairly certain that SCSI can go much further
> then that, but what about SATA?  I have to spec out my home server
> that I want to build once the wife's bonus arrives and I'm thinking
> about drives.  I have lots of OLD data that I could probably part
> with (old laptop files from companies I no longer work for, etc) but
> I don't want to - you never know when those five year old Lucent
> files might come in handy!
>
> :)
>
> I've been looking towards SATA for the large-volume storage and
> thinking about SCSI for my heavily used partitions (web, database,
> tmp).
>
> Does adding a SCSI drive just for high duty-cycle partitions rally
> matter?  Can I get away with just having everything on one, big SATA
> drive?  I normally only get  one chance over five years to build a
> really nice server, so I want to get this right.
>
> Greg