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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."
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.
Bingo!
Let's see you have 14 drives on a single IDE chain and then do a copy between drives.
Or how about the simple fact that you can get SCSI Ultra 360 that are nearly 3 times faster than anything you can buy that is IDE.
Or the fact that My SCSI drives come with 5 year warranty's The only SCSI drive I have ever had fail are reallllllly old. and EVERY scsi drive I have in service (over 120 of them) haven't been spun down or sat idle for over 4 years.
The new IDE might be close, but until they get proof of reliability under their belt like SCSI has It's only a watch and see item.
SCSI is known to be bullet proof and faster. enterprise ATA is not. so the next 5 years they had better not pull an IBM and produce the worlds crappiest drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Or just buy yourself an inexpensive 3Ware IDE RAID controller. The RAID-1 two disk controller is only about $120. The RAID-5 supporting 4 channel one is around $400 if I remember right. Considering they have built in Linux support and they have open source drivers we should really help support this company because companies like this are few and far between. I took my RAID-1 controller out of the box, popped it in my new system, put two "special edition" WD 80GB hard drives on it, created the mirror in the card's setup, and booted Linux and it recognized it as a SCSI controller with a SCSI disk attached. Just seems like a cleaner solution than mucking around with software raid. I never did like software raid much.