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Bluetooth And The Common Motherboard
Just say no to Apple writes "Computers seem to be on the precipice of a new chapter with things like Serial ATA and now bluetooth showing up as standard equipment. Of course the bluetooth kit that comes with this board is really tiny, which makes me wonder if you might be able to integrate it into a small remote device... But anyway, if a computer upgrade is on the horizon, have a look at this Epox board review and the bluetooth gear it uses."
This is an article I wrote for another forum, I think it fits well in this discussion.
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Maxtor recently announced a 320GB ATA drive. This, in itself, isn't too remarkable, other than the quite large size jump. What is remarkable is that they are targetting it to somewhere that has never been specifically aimed at with ATA drives, the large corporate storage market.
About a year ago, my company was running out of hard disk space, again. We had filled up our 500GB main live SCSI RAID, and our 190GB work in process Fiber Channel RAID was looking pretty small and obselete.
For reference, we paid about $30,000 for the 500GB SCSI RAID only three years ago. The Fibre Channel RAID came about a year earlier and cost about $45,000. Support on both is over $5,000 a year.
Our main archive needs are for mostly dead storage, that is, speed is not critical, but availability is. The main archive was previously housed on a very slow 1TB tape robot. The tapes were becoming a bottleneck in our workflow, so about two years ago I designed a shell script system in IRIX to allow the files to be stored on live RAIDs without the risk of using older versions of files by accident.
This worked fine, but with the increased throughput, we also had increasing demands for more storage. Our archive has increased in size almost 100% since 2 years ago, and grows by nearly 5GB per week or more.
So, about a year ago, things were starting to get tight again. I looked at the options, and Maxtor 100GB ATA drives were out. I figured we could use Linux in this situation, and just attach the storage to the network, since speed was not critical. After some searching, I found 3ware, www.3ware.com, who makes a PCI ATA RAID controller that holds up to 8 drives and has good Linux support.
There were some issues at first, due to a hardware recall on 3ware's part, but after the bugs were worked out, I managed to build two NAS systems. These were a huge leap forward in terms of storage cost, each server cost about as much as we pay in one year of support on the old RAID systems, and were complete computers, compared to simple direct attached storage. We got 3 TB of storage for about $12,000.
These storage servers were pretty novel a year ago. Very few people had built multiple Terabyte systems from ATA drives at that point. Now they are becoming pretty common. For example, RaidZone (www.raidzone.com) makes a similar NAS (Network Attached Storage) product based on Linux. www.acnc.com is also embracing ATA as a viable platform for large RAID, though they are packaging it with special controllers that allow one to use the ATA RAID with any operating system, the OS sees the RAID as a single, directly attached storage device, through SCSI and fibre channel. This has the added benefit of allowing SCSI features like command reordering, and more robust command integrity checking.
The coming of serial ATA over the next year is serving to quickly push ATA into the mainstream low-to-mid end server market. For large data storage needs, tapes no longer offer a viable option. Linux based NAS and hardware based directly attached ATA storage are quickly becoming the de facto standard for large archival storage, at 25% or less of the cost of tapes, without the hassle that comes with the non-random access of tapes.
ATA is often viewed in the industry as a "consumer level" technology, or "not for serious use". This view is quickly becoming outdated with the wealth of new ATA based server products.
ATA in many ways has a history a lot like Linux's. It is a low cost technology, that is quickly eating away the market of more "serious" technologies like SCSI and Tape. This is the same way Linux is eating away at the old UNIX market, replacing so called "high end" servers with commodity hardware. It's no surprise that many ATA NAS products are Linux based, for an embedded system where cost is a primary concern, a Windows license would add unnecessarily to the cost, and reduce reliability while limiting the freedom of the developer to customize the system to the application.
Theere is a long history of lower cost disruptive technologies killing superior technologies. ATA isn't technologically better (yet). It is, however, good enough, and much much lower cost, and that's all it needs.
The lack of high speed 10,000 RPM ATA drives does tend to make it not currently viable for high speed, random access, low latency, applications at this point, such as heavily loaded databases. There is no reason a high RPM ATA drive could not be produced in the future though. In my experience, most high capacity storage needs are archival, or only require a low transaction rate with moderate to high data rates.
In terms of raw throughput, ATA RAID can easily outpace any SCSI RAID, do to the nature of the interface. ATA RAID is implemented like switched ethernet, each drive has its own channel to the host controller. SCSI and basic configurations of Fibre Channel are like old fashioned shared ethernet, ATA is like switched ethernet.
ATA is Linux's new partner in the server room. Together, they are drastically reducing the cost of operations, while at the same time, offering a much more capable solution for many common needs.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.