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."

Comments

Re:30%?

[hxnwix]

SATA offers all the speed benefits of SCSI (such as command queueing and device initiated data transfer). In addition, it is one drive per channel. But "wait," you say, "servers need lots of drives in raid5 on each channel!!!" One drive per channel is a blessing in disguise.

From time to time I've seen drive logic fail (as opposed to surface errors), which often brings down the entire SCSI channel. With raid5, you can only afford to lose one drive and perhaps a couple hot spares. Certainly not 14 drives in one shot. SCSI is many pinned, and SCSI raid adapters are designed to have many drives on each channel. One drive per interface is extremely costly and impractical. In this respect, SATA is more robust.

"If one drive per channel serial interfaces are so good, why weren't the used in the first place," you might wonder. Modern high clock rate microcontroller technology permits much higher frequency twisted pair serial interfaces that can offer superior bandwidth to older parallel, ribbon cable interfaces. If SCSI were being designed today it would look something like firewire, which I'm sure you're not biased against. Don't be fooled by the ATA moniker.

This is a Serial ATA drive

[necere]

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.

Re:Your looooooong reply..

[lingqi]

i believe you are thinking of different things.

chips and tech becomes mature and their FAILURE RATE decreases. mature technology does not cost less to test. On the whole SCSI is still a more complex technology, and I would not be surprised if tested with higher margin / more thoroughly due to the "enterprise level reliability" thing.

besides, as devices gets more complex and more "mature," generally the testing costs increase because you have all these new features, plus the old features, plus the shit that keeps it backwards compatible, to test. you can do better on the profit margin / cost side by making ships that have a lower failure rate, but that does not mean chips gets tested less, or it takes shorter to test them. On the contrary, it usually goes the other way.

Anyhow, example: RAMBUS was expensive because it was a "cutting edge" manufacturing process. the output impedence of the chips had to be controled very precisely, which is difficult to do and a lot of it failed at test - driving up the cost. as process matured, less failed and price came down. but each chip still went through the same routine, and sat the same amount of time on the testers* and took the same number of pin-capacities**, so the TESTING COST stays the same***.

* as memory size increase, they sit longer, usually
** similarly, wider buses takes more pins
*** so in the end testing cost usually increases.

separate the two concepts.

MaximumPC did a IDE vs. SCSI

[Jethro On Deathrow]

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.

Western Digital Support Outsourced, Staff Laid Off

[gottabeme]

In my Ask Slashdot article asking about how heat and vibration affect hard drives, a WD tech support staffer responded, and I corresponded with him via e-mail. He told me that he was being laid off. Here are the details, quoted with permission:

Regarding tech support, basically our division manager decided he could cut costs hugely if he closed our location and contracted the work out outside the country. This may be, but people who don't have a clue about the product they're supporting and can just read the script in front of them is NOT one of the reasons we've won like every tech support award in the industry for the past 7 years. (FYI, our site opened 7 years ago...coincidence?) Look, I don't like to give companies a bad name, even the one that's laying me off. They still make a damn fine product, even if some of the execs have their head so far up their asses you'd have to send in a mining rescue team to find it. But indeed, don't count on good tech support after Feb 13. 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. Anything else above a replacement call or the most basic installation you'll have to pay for, and the people who know what we're doing (us) won't be around any longer even. Anyway I should stop about that, I tend to get a bit ranty at times :)