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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.
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
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....
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.
> 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
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?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
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.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
"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 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.
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!
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