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Enterprise-class ATA Drives
dfung writes "This has been mindlessly discussed many times before here, but Western Digital has now introduced real enterprise-class ATA drives with SCSI-like performance specs and 30% lower price. So now you can buy a real 10K rpm ATA drive. Interestingly enough, they mention the reason for the traditional difference in price between ATA and SCSI which I never have seen mentioned here - it has to do with testing costs, not controller electronics|platter quality|etc. Another interesting tidbit is that 160 million ATA drives were sold last year. I saw about 2 million of them stacked up in the aisles at Fry's Electronics yesterday, but that sure is a lot of drives."
Now I just need some enterprise class pr0n to store one of these suckers...
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Been waiting for this for ages =)
- It's going to be a real plus when running IDE-raid solutions too. Esp. if you compare the prizes to the SCSI solutions.
GO WD go, hopefully, these drives will be of higer quality than their recent IDE drives that have been breaking by the ton a week too...
-- 040
The Xserve and the fiberchannel Xserve raid would go nice with these new drives...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
"the reason for difference in price" - testing cost.
That was indeed the most cedible information I have ever read in the ATA/SCSI flame-war.
Also, there seems to be a five year warranty coming up on the Serial-ATA from Western Digital!!!
Since the price difference is only 30%, SCSI should be the obvious choice for server type tasks... considering all the other benefits of SCSI. IDE seems kinda hackish in comparison.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Now if only they make a 200G version with the 8M cache, gotta love those special edition drives.
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
So what does that increase in spindle speed actually translate into for Joe Computer?
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
1. Is there anything to relate drive geometry and the interface?
2. Testing time is a function of prodn. capacity. Obviously there'd be 10 times as many ATA drives as SCSI.
3. Spindle speed and drive interface - any connection?
More marketing spin here than drive spin. Probably enough to win the desktop PC market. If MS can spin, WD can do better. What next? ATA-XP drives specially tuned for XP??
God is an Anonymous Coward....jkrise
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
So, what are the options for a home user, who wants to buy a reliable hard drive? I know three people who have had hard drives fail in the last 2 years. This looks like an option, but a fairly expensive one (comparatively - if I'd just fallen through a time warp from 2 years ago, I'd be out there buying one now).
being IN the semiconductor test industry, it's really interesting how rarely does people really consider the necessity, and challenges, let alone costs, in testing.
few people realize that, for example (I am saying this example purely based on speculation, but a well-formed one) that the athlon MP chip cost difference is in a large part the extra test they run on it. You see - testing cost money, anything that would make test run longer means that more money has been spent on that part "making" it. One of the things the test industry is always talking about is speeding up testing, as a way to reduce testing costs.
aaanyway... next time anybody look at some nifty / advanced gadget, think to yourself "how the heck do they test THAT?" especially with things that have fast interfaces or embedded components...
anyway. erm - to stay on topic: ATA drives could handle 10k platters; I think the point about scsi has always been the more "industrial scalability / reliability / throughput / whatever" that's the selling point. well, and the fact that back in the day you can't buy IDE CDR drives.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Enterprise, class, eh? I just can't resist.
Kirk: Scotty, give me 10,000 rpm on those ATA drives!
Scotty: Captain, she can't take it!
Kirk: Damn it, Scotty, you.... promised me.... SCSI speeds!
Anywho, forget about Enterprise Class ATA Drives, when do I get a tricorder, or at least voice recognition built into my five-button wireless optical mouse?
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
If this had the same capacity as the "desktop" IDE drives, say 120+ GB then we would be talking. We don't use any drives SCSI or otherwise below 60 GB for our servers.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
For reliable home use, get a SLOW-spinning drive, preferably one with fluid spindle bearings, since those seem less inclined to wear into a higher-friction mode (at least that's what I think is happening when non-FDB drives get noisy over time). Maybe even a laptop drive, since those run the coolest. Whatever you do, expect occasional failures, so backup frequently.
the reason for the traditional difference in price between ATA and SCSI has to do with testing costs..
and apparently the ide drives aren't tested at all
> The Raptor also carries a five-year warranty.
The five year warranty is a welcome inclusion. Western Digital is good about replacements.
I have a hard time believing though all my clicking-clacking(WD), and bad block (Maxtor) drives have to due with lack of testing. Testing doesn't help make the drives more reliable. Either SCSI drives have a high test failure rate, or there is more to the story.
10K drives at less than SCSI prices are a welcome addition to the low end market, but I'd only use it where reliability and high performance isn't crucial. IDE drives still don't have their own processor leaving a big advantage to SCSI, right?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
That means at least several million failed. That is alot of tears.
Testing doesn't help make the drives more reliable.
of course it does.. test, find a bug, fix bug, test some more, etc etc
So ATA's are tested in batches while SCSI's are tested individually. I think I will continue to run my business critical DB's on SCSI in that case. I just don't think I could sleep at night knowing I trusted some muppet at the factory to pay attention to the test result stats and report them back to the designers/production guys correctly.
"I kill you! You no good 56'ing!"
It's been a long road
Gettin' from there to here
It's been a long time
But a fast ATA is finally here
I can download pr0n really fast at last
So much that I'll go blind
Slow ATA's not gonna bottleneck no more
No it's not gonna change my mind
'Cause I've got pr0n, lots of pr0n
I've got so much I dont have to
Ever leave the house
Thanks to faster ATA
I've got such hairy palms
Because of my fast hard drive
I've got pictures
Of all the pr0n stars
I've got (I've got) I've got (I've got) I've got
Pr0n
Lot's of pr0n
For not disappointing me. I was looking for just this kind of reference. As soon as I saw "Enterprise" in the title...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
i've gone through so many server scsi disks here that were really expensive. seems like the quality really isn't any better than ide.
all you want to avoid is getting rid of your information that is stored on the disks. any responsible it-manager will buy raid systems so it doesn't really matter if you pop a broken scsi or ide disc out of the array and replace it.
i don't see any point in buying scsi with expensive discs, expensive controllers and expensive cables.
We are all individualists!
Oh great. I suppose these things will produce about 40dB going by the rest of WD's range. I'll wait for Seagate's thanks.
The biggest SCSI drives I've seen are just less than 150Gb but Maxtor makes a 250Gb ATA drive. Is there a technical reason why there isn't size parity?
I've had a preference for SCSI drives for years and I've come to accept that I have to pay a steep premium (and now I know why) but what frustrates me is the density, or lack thereof, with SCSI drives.
It is always interesting to see all the jumping through hoops to defend the use of SCSI. But I think it is all bullshit.
Every manufacturer could, at any time, start producing a diskdrive that has the mechanical and head/servo electronics of an existing SCSI drive integrated with an ATA bus interface. It would have the reliability of the SCSI drive, and assuming that manufacturer has experience in ATA electronics there is no reason to assume that it would have problems on that end.
No need to have it in the market for 5 years to prove reliability. Disk drives are not even in the market for such a long time.
No, they just want to sepatate two different price categories and don't want to blur that gap by offering drives with features from both sides.
I don't entirely understand why it is a 36.7GB drive? By this I mean, why do SCSI drives usually go up in multiples of 9GB (i.e. 9, 18, 36, 72) whereas IDE hard drives tend to go up in 10's, etc. (at least recently)? And since this is IDE, why does it have a size more akin to that of a SCSI drive?
Thanks,
Behlal
When it comes to concurrent access, which basically means "busy server", ATA just doesn't cut it. ;), or just plain lie.
We had some entry-level Sun (netra X1) with IDE drives collapse under medium load, just because of logging. I've had older, slower, SCSI suns perform under much more load without this kind of issue.
ATA is ok for hoarding pr0n, it's OK for the live backup system; but I'm not putting those into any kind of serious server.
And don't you mention ATA RAID. Those who do never used real SCSI Raid (as in "Enterprise" RAID
It's a cost/performance tradeoff all right.
ATA had many uses, but stops short of anything inside a 19" rack.
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
So how can testing of ATA drives be cheaper than SCSI? And how can SCSI drives be that magnitude more expensive than ATA on the strength of that alone?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
This is a Serial ATA drive, which the article even mentions (second paragraph: "...Enterprise Serial advanced technology attachment..."), but then proceeds to call it an ATA drive (instead of SATA) for the rest of the article.
Here's a somewhat less misleading article.
has made my 'head' 'spin' too much. Fact is, I'm not convinced. SCSI has existed longer than IDE, and the chips and tech had that much longer to mature. Testing SCSI should therefore be faster and cheaper, IMHO
Sensible Moderators are Oxymorons.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
"Hmmm I can hotplug scsi disks in and out of the array... IDe... OOPS no you cant do that."
Dear idiot child, the SATA specifies a protocol and interface for hotswapping. The disks under discussion are SATA.
Idiot.
sorry, couldn't resist.
God is an Anonymous Coward...jkrise
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Maxtor released their 10K drives. Rapture series drives are limited to 36GB I believe (1 plater), have a 5 year warrenty, and rated for 1.3 million operating hours (I think its 1.3 million, might be wrong). These drives are SATA, and are hot-swappable. And you too can own one for about $140-160. Which when you look at the price of SCSI, its VERY cheap.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I saw the headline and thought this was going to be about a more reliable hard drive, something I'd gladly pay more money for.
But no, it's just a high performence drive built with the same quality control as WDs cheaper drives. How... nice.
Oh well, guess RAID really isn't a luxury anymore.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
SCSI is faster and more flexible, and perfect for use in the enterprise. Remember, "enterprise" = high profit margins.
SCSI drives tested individually? Of course, they are meant for enterprise use, blah, blah! But if that is the case, why aren't enterprise ATA drives not tested individually too, eh?
I am sure the extra testing made on SCSI drives puts the price up, but is that necessary? Why not just mass-produce them like ATA?
Mass produce SCSI, and it will kick ATA's butt all around the room. Hard drives manufacturers just want to hold on to their enterprise cash cow by keeping production down to low levels, and keeping margins high.
This month's issue pits IBM's best IDE vs. a Seagate Cheetah SCSI.
The Winner? The SCSI drive by a margin of more than 30%. There is still a huge difference, especially in the random seek and file transfer areas.
Enterprise-class??
Great, I'll bear it in mind if I ever build a starship.
How many here think of the controller costs while comparing?
Sensible Moderators are Oxymorons
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Tagged Queuing Explaination.
However, IBM's working on similar concepts for ATA.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Just wanted to point out that Hitachi (Formerly IBM storage) has yet to release a SATA drive. WD's new drive is ONLY the 2nd SATA drive out there, with the first SATA drive (Seagate Baracuda V) really just a regular ATA drive that is available in SATA version, thus no real hardware improvements cause it was origionally designed with an IDE connection, and needed to still meet the requirments for a normal IDE drive.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
When you start getting to systems that are performing long term storage (ie, little I/O, but lots of disks), you may have significantly more than just one drive on a SCSI chain.
Now, if you're striping for performance purposes, you'll get better latency by using a single controller for each drive, however, as we don't know what the application is, we can't make gross generalizations about the cost of a project.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hot swappable is the only thing that was missing for an ATA drive to be used in an Enterprise environment. SATA has hot swappable. Performance should be on par with SCSI in terms of seek time, disk transfer rate, etc. Only thing that is missing is a stupid SCSI ID that you no longer need to set on the drive's jumper. Seems to me to be easier now.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I don't know about everyone else but I have terrible luck with WD drives. I've experienced 3 drive failures in my computer lifetime and they've all been WD's. I have a few Maxtor's though that have been humming along for years not with no problems. I've decided I'll only by Maxtor IDE drives.
Can anyone convince me otherwise?
Ricky Silk
kung foo ezine let me waste your time.
IDE does have its own processor, Integrated Drive Electronics. Now if you want to get into large numbers of drives in raid configurations you need something with lots of IDE channels and a RAID coprocessor, but those cost about the same as comparable SCSI controllers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When you say 'serious server', you have to qualify it. For systems where everything's going to be loaded into memory, and only logging from ONE application, you're fine with an X1 or V100. [eg, NTP, DNS, DHCP].
Now, for anything that requires file access (HTTP, LDAP, NNTP, SMTP, or even just running multiple apps on a single box), you're going to want to go to SCSI for the benefits of tagged queuing (yeah, I just posted this link on a seperate thread, so the link's redundant, but the message it's supporting is different)
As you said, ATA is fine for desktops, as for the most part, the person's oly doing one thing at a time, however, if there's major disk I/O (video/audio editing), you start getting to 'workstation' class, and could get a performance increase out of SCSI or FC-AL.
As with any engineering or tuning process, you need to know what the characteristics of the system are before you can make a decision. If the process is bottlenecked by CPU, memory, or network I/O, the disks may not have an impact -- however, upgrading one of the other items may suddenly create a need for a better storage architecture.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Memory is 10x more reliable and more shock resistant. It is also nanoseconds rather than milliseconds and doesn't take NEARLY the power or the "pixie dust" to produce.
A company called ADTRON makes SCSI 2.5" Flash drives. I bought one used on eBay (1 gig) about three weeks ago. I put it in a PowerBook Duo (1995 laptop). The Duo now lasts as long as a modern iBook and the difference is between night and day in App launch, speed, and most unforseen, graphics display. It appeared as if I had almost doubled processor speed.
If you want to see if I'm telling the truth. Look for SCSI Flash or IDE Flash 2.5" drives on eBay and try it in your laptop for a day. There are regularly 350 meg IDE laptop drives for sale. Right now the capacities are capped at 4 gig (and the price on one is $4600) But if WD, Seagate, Maxtor and all the other platter people would just get with the program I'm sure we could have MUCH smaller drives than current systems, with much denser capacities than even today.
I don't see why laptop manufacturers don't push this very hard. Battery life is almost doubled (no moving parts) and it almost eliminates the bottleneck that laptop hard drives have. As for desktops, you could have 4 of these drives in the space of one and possibly have them raided!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
36GB? Give me a call when the 160, 200, or 320's are in that range for price and reliability. Its just more cash scamming. I've seen 36GB drives for as low as $50...the testing makes the price go up stuff is pure corporate %&***^)(....
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
At Fry's? Yep, and some of those drives sold multiple times, according to the "someone returned this but we're still selling it as new" tags.
It's interesting that people never consider their hardware or useage as a factor in failure.
I imagine things can happen in strange ways (as this is true for everything else) that there are some programs that may corrupt hard drives and HELP create bad blocks. People may use the drives full speed, full throttle for too long, and possibly getting surges in their IDE cables or power cables!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
ATA disks are cheaper to manufacture than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives for several reasons. The main reason is that ATA disks are tested in batches, whereas SCSI and Fibre Channel drives are tested individually.
I can understand if SCSI is much more complex to test, but test individually? Why can't you put a bunch of them on a scsi chain? You can only have 2 devices on a IDE chain. How unusal is the testing equipment?
ATA disks are cheaper to manufacture than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives for several reasons.
One really huge difference lies also in electronics. Usually it's called SCSI Control Blocks (short: SCB's). They are actually commands, sent from SCSI controller to devices telling them what to do (read or write data, etc.)
Any decent SCSI drive will support at least 32 of them and it will execute them out of order, mostly optimizing head-movements. Which gives huge performance boost under truely multi-tasking system.
The problem you ran into (cost) is the reason that they aren't more widely used. Besides density is also a problem, the densest memory chip I know of are 128MB, so to get 40GB you would need a whole heck of a lot of them =) I doubt you would be saving any power or heat disapation at that point, of course you would get speed and latency improvements, but the costs would be rediculous. I can get a 40GB 7200rpm drive for about $65 these days, in ram I can only get 512MB for the same money, or about an 80:1 advantage for the HDD.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
OK, so somebody explain why ATA disks can be tested in batches and SCSI cannot. This still sounds like smoke and mirrors to justify raping SCSI users.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I saw about 2 million of them stacked up in the aisles at Fry's Electronics yesterday, but that sure is a lot of drives.
Fry's this, Fry's that... Maybe someday I will have the privilege to go to Fry's... =P
... which of course both ATA and SATA drives can do. It'll probably be standard on SATA drives as soon as they go from "rebuilt ATA" drives to SATA proper.
My ST336918N claims 800,000 hour MTBF.
Can ATA deliver that?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I've worked as a computer technician in the past, and have seen the questionable quality of Western Digital drives in action (even before they stopped making SCSI drives altogether). The reliability of their drives was pretty poor - not to mention the Caviar 2-series drives, with the crap bearings, that died so fast. I remember RMA'ing and otherwise replacing a lot of them. Don't know about anyone else, but the words "enterprise-class" in the same sentence as the name "Western Digital" draw either puzzlement or laughter from me.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
But if none of that bothers you, there are adapters you can get that let you put a PCMCIA or CF flash card into an ordinary IDE slot.
I've had West Dig, Seagate and IBM drives all keel over far too quickly...
I've still never had a Maxtor die on me..
I'll only buy maxtor drives now.
>Our division manager has announced it's his goal to handle 95% of support with people reading off of a basic script with no training.
Why not simply supply the support script in the box with the drive, and let the end users read it themselves (with no training).
What's the point of paying someone to sit at the end of the phone to read what it says on a piece of paper.
No wonder the tech economy is so messed up.
"ATA disks are cheaper to manufacture than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives for several reasons. The main reason is that ATA disks are tested in batches, whereas SCSI and Fibre Channel drives are tested individually. "
What a pile of horse crap. ATA drives are cheaper because:
- ELECTRONICS.The electronics are a LOT cheaper. The amount of custom logic to support the performance requirements and features of SCSI make the ASICs much more expensive. ($20-$30+)
- SUPPORT. The main reason SCSI/FCAL drives are so expensive is the hand-holding that the big OEMs require when integrating drives into their boxes. "I had a hard error. Fly someone out here tomorrow". Yes, if you buy a drive at Fry's, you don't get this level of support. SCSI manufacturers could care less about drives bought individually through distribution. That is the dumping ground for drives they couldn't sell to an OEM. Many of the big OEMs ship ten of thousands of drives a month. That is who these drives are being made for. There are entire teams devoted to each big OEM customer.
- CUSTOM FEATURES. This goes hand-in-hand with support. Each of the big OEMs requires custom code and electronics features. There are multiple developers per customer to make this happen.
- QUALITY. In order to keep desktop drives cheap, the manufacturing yields must be very high (90%+). This isn't done through creating superior components. It is done by shipping any component that isn't dead into the field. Crappy parts shipped = high failure rates. Don't believe MTBF numbers, they are a crock.
Now, that said, there is a move towards using desktop drives in low-end server apps. The main reason is obviously cost. Many OEMs would like to drive this into the middle and high-end ranges as well. The OEMs are under the misconception that they can get a desktop drive and that it will be supported like the server drives, have equivalent performance and reliability. Given the extremely low margins on desktop drives, this isn't going to happen. Is there any reason that desktop drives can't be made more reliable and feature rich? Of course not. But it is going to cost youAnd yes, I have a clue. I work in server-class HDD development.
i think one thing the scsi and fc has to their advantage is aside from the bandwidth, they can afford to have bigger IOPS (I/O Operations per second.) So, having lots of read and write request causes lots of IOPS and may reduce the performance even though the HDD can still handle the load.
:)
also, i believe (though you may contest at me) that SATA is to FC (serial) while ATA is to SCSI (parallel.)
but still, as an it manager, i would want to have a piece of mind that the hard drive i am buying is being tested and i can forget about the drives for 5 years until such time there are bigger and faster drives at our disposal.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
In comparison, I can find a Western Digital WD400JB (40gb) drive for $81. If I get two of these in raid, that'll be $162 for a rig that will outperform it.
Even more compelling, I can get a 120gb WD1200JB drive for $140. Tagged together, that's two drives for $280.
For $80 more, I can get a rig that outperforms the single drive and holds three times as much.
10,000 RPM is not ready for mainstream use. When the size and price competes with 7200 RPM, I'll jump on the bandwagon, but for now I'm happy with my RAID setup.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
being IN the semiconductor test industry, it's really interesting how rarely does people really consider the necessity, and challenges, let alone costs, in testing.
Given the low quality and low reliability of so many devices, I didn't think they were testing anything!
I say this mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I have bought products that simple would not work. It wasn't a case of the devices being defective (ie, faulty single unit), but devices that just don't work *at all*.
I just returned a Hauppage WinTV PvR-350. For $200, it promised hardware MPEG2 encode and decode and the usual suite of video in/outs. The first system I tried it on it didn't work at all. Tech support sent me a suite of 'beta' drivers and some convoluted instructions wildly different than the documentation. The card started actually working (ie, video input was displayed and captured), but system performance (on a ~900Mhz PIII system) was so abysmal even when not writing streams to disk that the computer was unusable. I moved it to another system and it didn't work *at all* with any driver suite or graphics card I could find.
This isn't the first time I've run into products like this that aren't just somewhat disappointing but actually totally fail to function. If you run into this often enough, you start to ask yourself if these designs were ever tested at all.
Don't buy the Hauppage card. Ick -- even if it had worked, you couldn't capture from a third party application and the Hauppage application was pretty ugly (bad GUI, etc) and it was a pretty big hodgepodge of software from different vendors. Worst, I don't think the card does hardware MPEG2 decode to screen, I think its software decode, based on the low system performance.
Why would it need to have a run-time of 1.2 million hours? That's 136 years.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
This time I am posting anonomous, cause the last time I tried to say it was made up, they modded up the "made up" post and modded down the one that says "I made up that last post".
there is ata tagged command queueing is the 2.5 development kernel but its experimental and doesnt work (for me) that the ibm deskstar drives support (and even some other drives from other manufactures). i wonder of the performance increase if any this would bring my aging 75GXP 20gigger.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Does that mean they are all nuclear powered?
I for one am giving ATA a shot.
To keep the costs down on a backup server, I spec'd it out with 4 200GB Maxtor drivers hanging off a 3ware RAID controller.
After all is said and done, RAID 5 and formated. I have a 568GB Array for a fraction of the cost of a SCSI equivilent.
This server is not a 99.9999 uptime server, but it needed big storage. If a drive fries...nobody is going to complain if its down while a drive is being replaced and the array gets rebuilt.
Its simple enough to pick up up another low cost IDE drive and slap it in..(By the time one does blow..of course the price point for 200GB drives will be even lower than 2day).
In a real pinch,when adding or replacing a drive, I can buy a drive at the local computer shop... This as opposed to waiting on vendor to send out their 'specific' SCSI drive with their proprietary trays (HP!)
So ya.. I see IDE having a role in the enterprise.
It remains to be seen if the 'enterpise' IDE drives live up to their billing.
ARGGH!!!!!!
Tho I imagine this explains why my email to WD support about bugs found in WD's HD tools v10.x (current version) got only an automated response.
Outsourcing all tech support has become my #1 redflag indicating that a company has been taken over by managers who've never done a day's work in the trenches, and have only ONE skill: maximizing the short-term bottom line. If that guts the company, too fucking bad -- they'll be long gone, resume showing the "cost savings" they "created" in hand, before their decisions come back and bite the company in the ass.
In this case, I'd bet it's going to bite 'em with increased RMAs when there was in fact nothing *physically* wrong with the HD. Frex, there's no way in hell a script monkey would have figured out that the HD I was working on this past Monday had only a spectacularly mangled partition table, and the reason it wouldn't reformat was due to a problem with WD's newest software, NOT due to dead hardware. (An OLD version that I still had did the job just fine, and the drive is working again.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
To see this idea taken to it's logical extreme, see the Apple Xraid. One of my clients, a post-production video house, has been working with two of them for about a week now. They are amazing pieces of equipment, just as fast if not faster than the SCSI drives they are about to replace -- and are based on ATA 100/133.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
I remember reading a couple of days ago about DRM-specific instructions being included in the ATA standard. So, does the SCSI standard have any DRM-like instructions? If not, anybody else see this as a way of getting DRM into the enterprise market? Last place I want DRM hardware is MY server!
One of the reasons, not the only reason. Also testing cost is directly related to quality. The increse in the cost of manufactoring a higher quality drive due to material is smaller then testing for that quality. The cost of testing is always the bulk of the cost for manufacuring any advanced electronic device. A better tested part is a better part.
Unless your Desktop PC is running an application that touches on many many files. Oh like building a large project.
Blar.
It's also a good example of a day late, and a dollar short. I saw this back around February the 8, if not earlier. And yes I submitted it at that time too.
Hmmm, its nice to see ATA possibly getting better, but does anyone know the status on the new Serial SCSI effort? Supposedly you could use sATA or sSCSI drives on the same chain. Cant seem to get to the org web site right now. SDL
if you are putting a server together and using raid 0... have fun
however it is not a good idea to run raid 0 cost performance analysis compared to a scsi drive that will probably keep your data over the long run.... compared to your raido0...
-Lucas
Outsourcing to India seems to be the most popular trend. Veritas does it for Backup Exec support email. Microsoft is gradually moving their home OS support to India as well. They're not doing it in one big move because the media would love to bring it to the publics attention.
-Lucas
ATA disks are cheaper to manufacture than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives for several reasons. The main reason is that ATA disks are tested in batches, whereas SCSI and Fibre Channel drives are tested individually.
That's such a crock. I can pay about $200 for a 180GB ATA drive. I just paid over $1200 each for several 180GB SCSI drives, and that was the best price I could find.
So, they're saying that the thousand dollar difference was because my drive was individually tested? Heck, I'll revolutionize the SCSI drive market by cutting the manufacturers' costs in half by personally testing each drive at my new business for only $500 each! C'mon, it costs them $50 to test the drive.
Some of the thousand dollars goes into better parts, these are good, fast drives, but most of the difference is pure profit because they know SCSI is better, that the server market needs SCSI, that people need tons of storage, and that they can collude to get those prices.
Yes, I do think the FTC ought to check into it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Looks like Jens Axboe released a patch against 2.4.19-pre10, but I'm not sure it made it in.
Did you see "Journalling Support For IDE In 2.4" he released later for 2.4.21-pre4-bk and 2.4.20 in Kernel Traffic? Might be close to what you are after. . .
"enterprise" meant "reliable"? WD just ruined that gig.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
That's really not too bad of a failure rate I guess.
And here I thought SCSI performance was especially important in server type situations with multiple threads doing multiple disk accesses. The disk speed is one issue, managing multiple disk accesses from different threads is another. From what I've understood about IDE (ATA) is that even with multiple disks on an IDE cable, one thread blocks all other requests on the cable. Compared to SCSI where the multiple disks can be doing differnt tasks in parallel.
Am I wrong to still see SCSI as still the enterprise class disk solution?
--
hecubas
Hecubas
The question I have is, "How long will the warantees be on these enterprise ATA drives?" The vast majority of IDE drives now only have a 1 year warantee. SCSI drives are still at 5 year warantees. Will Western Digital be giving a SCSI-type warantee on these "enterprise" drives?
The article does not say. I have SCSI subsystems in every computer I own now, because I can pick up a used SCSI hard drive off of ebay that has a longer warantee than a brand spankin' new IDE hard drive from an online vendor.
Something to ponder...
The "enterprise class" drives have "SCSI-like performance"... That's a good one...
According to the benchmarks I've run, 7200RPM IBM IDE drives have similar or better performance than 10K RPM SCSI drives. For example, it took over a week of tuning including vendor interaction to get a 6-drive 10K RPM U160 SCSI system on a $750 Mylex RAID controller performing up to what a 6-drive 7200RPM IDE setup with 3ware controller.
The SCSI controller cost fully HALF what the full 720GB IDE array cost, and the SCSI array only had around 200GB of storage...
I know people like to think that SCSI is faster and uses less CPU time. I'd love to see someone prove it though. Based on my benchmarks, that just isn't true any more.
Sean
If you want Enterprise porn, you need nude Jolene Blalock (Sub-commander T'Pol) shots.
I don't know about "breakdown", so much as "gap adjustment". Remember all else being equal (same plane), the better service (tighter specs, greater reliability, and performance), the degree to which IDE manufacturers can match, while retaining their present advantages, as well as the impetus it provides to SCSI HD makers to maintain their "advantages", will define future battles. In other words there will always be some kind of difference as long as people have different requirements, and the price differential that goes with it. Nothing "ad-hoc" about that.
You saw 2 Million drives stacked up at Fry's.. unfortunately 1,999,997 of them have a return sticker on them..
They left out the fact that the prices are different not just because of the testing, but the fact that the scsi drives have to jam a bunch of crap on the drive for the scsi interface, and also make it small enough to fit in a standard bay. IDE lets other stuff (cpu and controller) do the thinking and cuing, using bandwith, but it is less expensive. There is also the pleasure factor of seeing hundreds of MB fly across scsi busses, while your friends wait 20 minutes with IDE ATA whatever.
Speed be damned, I don't think this is as great a concept as some might. At best, it's cool for video editing workstations who really need that kind of speed. But if I was going to pay more for a high-end disk, I'd go whole hog and pay for SCSI and reap the benefits of far greater reliability. To me, that's far more important than speed or price.
QUOTE
I saw about 2 million of them stacked up in the aisles at Fry's Electronics yesterday, but that sure is a lot of drives.
/QUOTE
Actually, those were all the ones purchased the year BEFORE, that were returned and Fry's is now selling again...
Well, I would advise anyone striping for performance purposes, to make certain someone brings rubbers. Else there will be a "cost of entry" alright.
. . . because then the Division Manager would not have a cushy job supervising these people!
Because anyone whose problem would be solved by the support script would not bother to read the support script.
It's just like people on the Internet who, instead of simply going to Google and typing in a few keywords, go to a forum or a chat room and say, "Anyone know of any good sites about ____?"
They can have the answer staring them in the face, but they won't see it until someone else rubs their nose in it. They just aren't willing to put forth two seconds of time and effort into figuring it out for themselves.
Remember the Four Letter Newbie (or Dummy) Salute....
On that note, I wonder if more people would read the directions and figure things out for themselves, tech support costs would be reduced so that companies didn't feel such a strong need to outsource it.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
what good is the speed (10k) when the system (IDE)cant handle that much. STATA, maybe, or event he idea of supporting more than 2 drives per channel. ide needs to speed up its data transfer. everyone is comparing IDE to Ultra160. well that a bit out of date with ultra320 on the market ( http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/prodtechi ndex.html?sess=no&language=English+US&cat=%2fTechn ology%2fUltra320 )
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
I plan on boycotting WD after hearing this. I'm getting fucking tired of our jobs going over seas to rag heads who work for 10 cents an hour.
Corporate America isn't about America anymore, all they give a shit about is the bottom line--so they hire 3rd world brown-skined sweatshop slaves, relocate their HQ to bermuda, pay no taxes and leech off the USA.
Eat shit Western Digital Management
Apple's XServe uses Western Digital SE Drives. The Xserve performs comparebly to most servers on the market (exceptions are Sun Blade and IBM blade, others I'm sure) - The units though can also handle SCSI - the Xserve raid is capable of Fibre Channel.
Two years ago your assertions about cost were correct, nowadays there is VERY little difference between cost of manufacture for a SCSI drive. In fact, Western Digital's own spec says that SE drives (IDE/ATA) are stripped down SCSI drives
The logic controller is only an interaction with the mainboard or SCSI card controller. (You seem to be knowledgeable about non CPU / Bus useage of SCSI so I won't detail the difference there) The part ( for the drive itself ) is $0.65 from i/o data in Japan. That's a complete SCSI "breadboard with intact electronics" for the bottom/under platter. That's in quatities of 10,000. I'm sure it gets cheaper from other companies or more volume.
As for the contracts. You DO get support from the drive manufacturers but AT A STEEP price. This in no way affects the price of consumer drives. Custom deign is EXTRA, not included in any price availible to I could assume 5 Billion in sales and higher corporate customers, which aren't much more than a 1000 companies worldwide.
That was a good post to say the least though.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Scsi hard drives sound like a plane taking off because they spin so fast and do not use liquid bearings.
I also wonder how fast these drives are.
I remember a MaximumPC article showing negligable differences between scsi and ide performance. However this was 2 years ago and I noticed on a post here that MaximumPC redid a scsi vs ide showdown and scsi kicked its ass.
I wonder if its the drive itself or the scsi technology? My guess is the drive.
Scsi is redicilously expensive for non server use and a drive just as fast for the home for 1/4th the price of scsi would be nice. I agree that scsi hard drive manufactors have price gouged the market. Since its server only its priced like Sun or SGI ram. Corporate customers pay more and consumers no longer use scsi so they charge the most a bussiness would pay for it. A decade ago it was a different story and scsi was only like %30 more then an ide equilivant drive since apple and many other oem's used them for desktops.
http://saveie6.com/
... or do you want me to explain it to your anecdotal self?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...class.
Which is what this thread is all about....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Once upon a time there was a DOS user who saw Unix, and saw that it was
good. After typing cp on his DOS machine at home, he downloaded GNU's
unix tools ported to DOS and installed them. He rm'd, cp'd, and mv'd
happily for many days, and upon finding elvis, he vi'd and was happy. After
a long day at work (on a Unix box) he came home, started editing a file,
and couldn't figure out why he couldn't suspend vi (w/ ctrl-z) to do
a compile.
-- Erik Troan, ewt@tipper.oit.unc.edu
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