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

Hmmm

[IanBevan]

Now I just need some enterprise class pr0n to store one of these suckers...

Re:Hmmm

[kingtonm]

Here ya go, why don't you start with this, some major, enterprise server porn. http://www.sun.com/smrc/photos-sun/downloads/datac enter-gen03s.jpg

Re:Hmmm

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Here ya go, why don't you start with this, some major, enterprise server porn. http://www.sun.com/smrc/photos-sun/downloads/datac enter-gen03s.jpg"

Nice rack!

Seems like a good idea

[MC68040]

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

Re:Seems like a good idea

[laa]

Just complile yourself a Linux kernel and do software RAID. Tom's
Hardware Guide had an article on software raid performance on here (this is about Windows 2000, but anyway).

Re:Seems like a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Apple's Xserve comes to mind..

[Thaidog]

The Xserve and the fiberchannel Xserve raid would go nice with these new drives...

Re:Apple's Xserve comes to mind..

[hcdejong]

Both the Xserve and Xserve RAID use ATA drives. Why wouldn't they benefit from faster ATA?

the reason for difference in price

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!!!

Re:the reason for difference in price

[doctor_oktagon]

"the reason for difference in price" - testing cost.

Think on how ridiculous this is:

No-one in their right minds deploys business-critical storage with anything less than some sort of RAID protection, where the failure of a single drive is no big deal.

Customers purchasing IDE drives, i.e. home users, small biz, are much more likely to have no protection, and as such lose everything if the drive breaks!

Think about it ;-)

Re:the reason for difference in price

[anon*127.0.0.1]

Okay, you're paranoid. Very, very paranoid.

If you want to get someone in trouble, there are any number of easier ways to do it. You're gonna sneak a file onto someones hard drive, then at some later time somehow induce a hard drive failure so the drive has to be sent back for warranty service, then notify the authorities anonymously and hope they take you seriously and hope they can find the drive and hope the file is stll there.

And that scenario is enough to keep you from buying a cheap, fast, big new hard drive with a five year warranty.

I dunno, maybe your enemies are much more devious and persistant then mine.

30%?

[ultrabot]

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.

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.

Re:30%?

[back@slash]

Since the price difference is only 30%

Ahhhh to be able to look at the toys and not pay attention to the price tag again *sigh*

Try purchasing a couple 6 terabyte file servers and then ask yourself how much a non-"kinda hackish" solution is worth. $10,000? $20,000?

Re:30%?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:30%?

[afidel]

Don't be dense, to do 14 (actually 12 is the most I know of) IDE drives you get a controller that has 12 interface channels and a controller chip. The speed per channel is meaningless because with the IDE solution the only bottleneck is the host bus and the speed of the interface chip, no single drive is going to saturate it's single line. Also did you read the article and notice the waranty one these drives? Yeah 5 years just like the SCSI drives. These drives are basically SCSI 10K rpm drives with an ATA controller board, hook em up to the right IDE host controller and you have a solution that will save you 30% on your storage costs, which is substantial for many enterprises.

Re:30%?

[Alien Being]

"SCSI is known to be bullet proof"

That's just plain wrong. I've had batches of SCSI drives with high failure rates. When the maker screws up the glue and heads start falling off, scsi versus ide doesn't enter into it. SCSI cabling, termination and a shared bus can also be problematic as can subtle diffs in SCSI protocol implementation.

The drawbacks of IDE have historically been: not offered on the 10-15krpm drives, cruddy cables, can't do >1 drive per channel, many broken implementations, lower qa standards.

Oldtime drives had no digital hardware onboard. It made sense to integrate things to the point where the device can locate its own sectors, but it's arguable that SCSI puts too much on the drive. I'm in favor of the 3ware Escalade style architecture where each drive has an independent channel, and is treated as a relatively dumb device.

With the improved cabling, qa and spindle speeds, I think we're about to see some really rockin' IDE storage systems.

Re:30%?

[budgenator]

The way I understand it if an IDE drive get a request for tracks 1,7,3,5,4 it reads 1, crosses six track to read 7, crosses four trqacks to read 3, crosses two trackes to read 5, the crosses one track to read 4 for a total of 13 tracks crossed.

on the other hand a SCSSI drive gets the same request and reads 1, crosses two to read 3 crosses one to read 4, crosses one track to read 5 and crosses two trackes to read 7 for a total of 6 tracks crossed.

the SCSSI disk using the elevator technique allways win when all other things are equal; and usualy the SCSSI disk is built with other advantages.

Need larger sizes...

[Jonah Hex]

Now if only they make a 200G version with the 8M cache, gotta love those special edition drives.

Re:Need larger sizes...

[Jonah Hex]

That large of a cache on a HD is really just more room to quickly dump data without actually having to write it to the hard drive immediately. Helps you get fastest possible data transfer when doing I/O with your drive, and on the scale of bag for your buck it isn't that expensive over their normal 2M cache drive.

Re:Need larger sizes...

[pantherace]

The idea of it being able to buffer 8MB on the disk. They aren't any faster sustained, but it helps if writing to the disk, and needing to do a random seek. This is highly modified by OS intelligence with regard to hard drives. (windows users get a bigger boost than linux users, because linux handles IDE better.)

I bought one when the were 130usd for a 120GB/8MB version, and I like it. If I had to get another one, and the price was more than 10usd difference , depending on capacity, I would get the normal version.

Re:Need larger sizes...

[Angry White Guy]

It's very ineffective when you have a total power outage. Trade-off is speed vs. reliability

Question about spindle speed

[Gryftir]

So what does that increase in spindle speed actually translate into for Joe Computer?

Re:Question about spindle speed

[hxnwix]

Faster defragging.

Re:Question about spindle speed

[David Gerard]

"I'm sure I forgot something, feel free to add stuff :)"

Heh. Vastly increased heat production. 10k RPM drives get quite hot!

Re:Question about spindle speed

[LordKronos]

Dont forget more noise. This usually is not an issue in a server room (there's so much noise already, who would notice), but it is if you want to use these drives in a workstation.

Re:Question about spindle speed

[Rolo Tomasi]

Higher data transfer rates (since more data passes under the read/write heads at higher spindle speeds).

Uhm, no. Read the article. The drive has a capacity of 36 GB. So the data tranfer rate will be slower, compared to a current high-capacity drive. Server drives are optimized for access time, not transfer rate. That's the reason why they keep increasing the rotational speed, at the cost of data density: rotational latency (the time a R/W head has to wait until a certain sector passes underneath it after it was positioned above the right track) is decreased.

Higher transfer rates are reached by putting multiple drives in a RAID configuration. That's also the reason why you'll not see any benefit from putting a single server drive in your desktop PC.

More 'Spin' than fact...

[jkrise]

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

Reliable HDD

[PhilHibbs]

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).

Re:Reliable HDD

[Fweeky]

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.

The Seagate Barracuda IV seems to be about the most reliable ATA drive about at the moment, with the assumption that the Barracuda V will behave similarly. While Maxtor (creeping bad sectors) and WD (crappy bearings) seem to have some common problems which crop up a lot, the 'cuda has been around for a while and I've heard nothing but good about it (aside from some RAID issues, which they fixed in the 'cuda V); from significantly smaller return rates in places which sell various makes in largeish quantities, to the simple lack of "my Seagate is failing!" posts on various forums.

Not very scientific, but certainly compelling evidence :)

Either way, I think a big issue with drives these days is heat; a lot of cases have the 3.5" bays in a deadzone where heat can build up quickly, and a lot of heat can massively reduce the lifetime of a drive. Either get a case where you can put them right at the bottom, near the air inlets and with lots of space around them for the air to circulate, or actively cool them. I've seen drives mounted in the top bays run at 50c which ran at 30c when mounted at the bottom; where do *you* think it's most likely to achieve and exceed it's 5 year design life? :)

heh; common misconseption

[lingqi]

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.

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.

Re:heh; common misconseption

[jkrise]

"speeding up testing, as a way to reduce testing costs."

Shouldn't SCSI drives be faster to test? Like, the testing commands can be integrated into the drives - most SCSI firmware support several commands.. Secondly it's easier to connect 15 SCSI drives than 15 IDE drives. IDE drives have to be tested for master and slave options as well. I guess WD just has the average Joe in mind, with this marketing spin.

God is an Anonymous Coward...jkrise

Re:heh; common misconseption

[lingqi]

hmm; don't think of it that way. it's simply not possible for people to go and plug in stuff by hand on a cable and test them. usually. that's wayyyyyyy in the end anyway - intergration testing in software people's terms?

I would *suspect* that scsi chipsets have more things to be tested than ATA ones, since as you may notice, they are supposed to work with 15 devices OR by themselves, possibly providing onboard termination or not.

testing often starts at the wafer stage (where each chip is probed and marked, failed ones are crushed, oftenly), and again when chips are packaged - usually speed sorted / repaird (if possible - a lot of memory devices support repair) at this time. After that, integration testing is actually EASIER because this is when you have a whole set of firmware commands to work with, etc.

Frequently chips have dedicated testing commands, though (that you don't get to know), so things are not completely dire. most flash memory have test modes, for example, where if you put in a code sequence it will write the entire array into, say, a checker board pattern. This is to avoid massive delays of half microsecond writing each location, sequentially. Logic chips (like, say, scsi chipsets) usually have a different challenge - they have embedded subsections, often cache, that you don't have access to directly.

now, to get "into the chip" you will have to sequentially put in the test patterns / vectors into special registers that reside on the lines that run between each embedded component. one register at a time (usually sequentially through a few (dozen or less) pins. testing is expensive, but pins more so ;). after each "scan burst" you toggle the clock, and sequentially read out all the registers to see if the chip did what you wanted it to do.

this gets back to the scsi being harder to test - probably the control chipsets are more complex. I can't imagine the mechanical sections being any different (besides the 15krpm ones, anyhow) - generally when something have to communicate with a bunch of other things (like scsi) versus just a few (ATA), the former is more pain in the butt testing wise.

oh, btw - more PIN is also another factor to costs. testers have a limited number of pins, so if you have more pins to test, you test less per turn. can't speak authoratatively on the pincount of drive controller chipsets... just FYI here.

side note: one thing you realize after being in testing is that semiconductor manufacturs often (or, sometimes - depending on the manufacture) puts a LOT of margin into their chips. when they say the chip is rated 75 degrees C, they really mean 75 degrees because the chip was TESTED at that temperature.

ok. long rant... gotta stop now.

Warp 10, scotty!!

[patrixmyth]

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?

Nice, but...

[erlando]

36 GB @ $160 ..? Given the further advantages of SCSI over IDE I would rather fork out the extra $40 and go for the SCSI drive.

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.

Re:Nice, but...

[afidel]

What if you are buying 40 drives for a large raid enclosure, would you spend the extra $1600 + more expensive cables + more expensive controllers? Many people are starting to see where putting a bunch of IDE drives behind something like a IDE->FC controller makes sense since the limit is the host->disk box connection, witness the Apple XServe RAID for one, previous to this announcement though there was one large consumer of disk space that couldn't have considered these boxes though and that is database servers, they need the lower latency of higher rpm drives. Now we can have (most of) the best of both worlds.

Testing has solved the problems? Yeah, ok.

[peterdaly]

> 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

Re:If anything, stay away from these

[Ed Avis]

Do 'Western Digital' and 'server' belong in the same sentence? I mean people would be a bit bemused if you could buy eMachines 'enterprise-class' hardware or subscribe to 'AOL Datacenter Edition'.

Is the popular view of WD drives wrong? Or are all the manufacturers just as bad these days in the consumer space?

Batch testing

[FungiSpunk]

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.

Re:Testing has solved the problems? Yeah, ok.

[PhilHibbs]

Testing doesn't help make the drives more reliable.

Yes it does, on aggregate. I'm more familiar with chip manufacture, and there, they they test samples out of a batch, and rate the entire batch based on the performance of a sample. It works. The quality of the silicon, temperature, vibration, all vary from batch to batch, and in aggregate, the results are fairly reliable.

Enterprise?

[StealthSock]

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

why scsi at all?

[colonel.sys]

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.

SCSI is great but...

[gklinger]

Why aren't SCSI drives available in the same densities as ATA drives?

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.

Re:SCSI is great but...

[hcdejong]

The article said that to increase spindle speed, they had to decrease platter diameter (=capacity). I guess that goes for SCSI drives as well as these new ATA ones.

Re:SCSI is great but...

[Zapman]

You're not looking.

www.pricewatch.com shows 181gb scsi drives. There are also 4 x 181gb drives 1 cube away from me for our EMC.

Maxtor may make a 250 gb drive, but you can't use it in your PC. IIRC, ATA133 can only address up to 120gb.

Also, when you're buying scsi, you're not going for single drive density. You're aiming for throwing 10 drives into a RAID 1+0 config (or similar). And finally, those 250gb are new. They're not going to release it for SCSI until they have some experience with it's failure rates, and what not.

Why so difficult?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why so difficult?

[AlecC]

That is not the point. It is not that Scsi is significantly better as an interface, it is that Scsi has become a "marker" for drives manufactured to a higher spec, which need a higher price. It is more like "business class" in flying - you travel in the same aircraft, but a get a better class of service. it is not in the self-interest of any manufacturer who sells in both marketplaces to devalue the premium-grade scsi marker. Howeve, since WD sells only in the "budget" IDE marketplace, they have an interest in upgrading the image of their brand. What we may be seeing here is the start of the breakdown of an ad-hoc, non-conspiracy-based, "industry standard"

SCSI and ESATA Size Query

[Behlal]

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

Re:SCSI and ESATA Size Query

[Reziac]

Actually -- per some info I found in M$'s knowledge base, it appears that this 5 year old *bug* in FDISK (NOT in WinXP itself), limiting partition size to 32bg (or 64gb in some cases) was left in WinXP's FDISK on purpose.

Per the KB article I found, if you have a FAT32 partition greater than 32gb, XP may experience "data wrapping", which will mangle data. Therefore you should NEVER use FAT32 partitions greater than 32gb with WinXP. (NTFS does *not* have the problem.)

I'm fairly sure I've already seen this happen, with a WinXP partition that was FAT32 and 34gb. At the time I'd thought the HD had failed and RMA'd it, but after finding that KB article, now I'm pretty sure it was "confused filesystem due to this here wrapping bug" not "bad HD".

ATA just doesn't cut it

[thunderbee]

When it comes to concurrent access, which basically means "busy server", ATA just doesn't cut it.
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 ;), or just plain lie.
It's a cost/performance tradeoff all right.
ATA had many uses, but stops short of anything inside a 19" rack.

Re:ATA just doesn't cut it

[afidel]

I've used SCSI RAID, ATA RAID and FC RAID, and to be honest the usual slow point is either the host bus or the network. Yes I wouldn't use ATA RAID for Walmart's product database but for file serving or a lot of other applications a bunch of IDE drives behind an IDE RAID controller is just fine, and for things like dumping to disk before dumping to tape for backups you can't beat the cost of gobs of IDE disks. As with most things there is a niche for every product, otherwise the product wouldn't exist for long =)

Re:ATA just doesn't cut it

[Rebar]

And don't you mention ATA RAID. Those who do never used real SCSI Raid (as in "Enterprise" RAID ;), or just plain lie.

Er, no. I've used both, and I am not lying.

One can cost an order of magnitude less than the other, and still performs reasonably well for small servers.

I'm talking about hardware ATA RAID, not that promise or highpoint software raid. I just tested one hardware ATA RAID-1+0 set - 75MB/sec writes, 81MB/sec reads, 640GB online.

I'll grant you this: the performance of "enterprise class" hardware SCSI raid may exceed this, unless you go fibre channel which will definitely exceed this. You may be more concerned with latency than bandwidth, in which case the faster rotational speeds of SCSI drives may be somewhat better for you (thus the point of the original post). And generally, you can cram more SCSI cards in an enterprise class server than ATA cards in a PC.

However, when looking at $50,000 storage solution vs. a $5,000 storage solution with similar reliability and performance for a particular business problem, which would you choose, if you are aren't spending someone else's money?

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:This is a Serial ATA drive

[complex]

wish i had mod points to mod you up, or i wouldn't even post.

this is correct: the raptor is wd's serial ata drive. maxtor has sata drives out now too, at 60gb and 80gb sizes. more and larger to come soon.

and man, sata drives are wicked fast. as fast at ata100 7200rpm drives, RAIDed! check out http://www.envynews.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=488 3

Re:This is a Serial ATA drive

[poot_rootbeer]

I hope someone develops a network interface card (NIC) that connects over a Serial ATA (SATA) bus.

They could market it as "SATA NIC"!

(And you thought only SCSI chains required the sacrifice of chickens)

On another Note: Maxtor Relaesed their 10k SATA

[Fallen Kell]

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.

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.

ATA cheaper than SCSI?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Enterprise-class??

[1s44c]

Enterprise-class??

Great, I'll bear it in mind if I ever build a starship.

Two words: Tagged Queueing.

[oneiros27]

Tagged Queuing Explaination.

However, IBM's working on similar concepts for ATA.

And it was ATA not SATA...

[Fallen Kell]

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.

You have to look at the application

[oneiros27]

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.

How drives could be faster & more reliable . .

[adzoox]

I honestly do not see why things are not moving quicker towards Flash ATA or Flash SCSI or Flash Firewire 800 for that matter.

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!

Big Deal

[haplo21112]

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 %&***^)(....

Re:If anything, stay away from these

[AlecC]

This is WD trying to poach the other guy's market. The traditionally produce low end, low margin drives. They envy the "enterprise classe" drives profit margins. But they know that they can't muscle in with a face-to-face competitor, so thy are tring to get into the gap between traditional "desktop" and "enterprise" market places. Might work.

Difference between ATA and SCSI ...

[Mkx]

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.

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 :)

Write wear and write speed

[phr2]

It's true that a flash drive has no seek latency. But it's reading transfer speed is slower than a HD (though still respectable) and its writing speed is quite slow (much slower than its reading speed). Also, flash memory wears out if you write to it too many times. "Too many" in modern parts means between 100k and 1 million writes--not a problem for something like a digicam, but for your swap partition or a busy part of a file system, it could be a real issue. Also, of course, there's the cost.

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.

Someone please get a clue ...

[halldav3]

First, this article has a few blatant falsehoods.

"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 you ...

And yes, I have a clue. I work in server-class HDD development.

Re:Your looooooong reply..

[Christopher Bibbs]

I have no idea how you can relate technology maturity to faster and cheaper testing. Paint is probably the most mature technology I have ever worked with personally and the testing requirements were insanely expensive. I'm not talking about consumer house paint, mind you, but automovtive paint. The time spent testing and developing new tests and testing methodology was insane. Back when they finally developed a method to use lasers to determine application quality (at a huge R&D expense) did it shorten the time it took to inspect a car? Yup, but guess what? Now *every* car gets inspected so the time spent testing is actually greater.

You don't even want to get me started on car tires.

The problem with "mature" technology from a QA standpoint, is that your customer begins to expect the product to be perfect everytime. Remember Micropolis SCSI drives? Everyone remembers them because they were so crappy, but the equally crappy BigFoot drives have mostly been forgotten because no one expected much from an IDE drive at the time.

Welp... I just jumped onto the ATA bandwagon...

[MindSlap]

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.

Slightly off topic, but ...

[GreatOgre]

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!

Bull

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Yeah..

[kevinvh]

You saw 2 Million drives stacked up at Fry's.. unfortunately 1,999,997 of them have a return sticker on them..