Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Where are the High-Capacity SCSI Drives?

Posted by Cliff on from the has-ATA-surpassed-SCSI dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Storage technology has really exploded in recent years, giving us ATA drives up to and exceeding 200-250 GB per drive. Why is it that SCSI drive technology has remained stagnant? I can't find a SCSI drive exceeding about a 146 GB capacity. Instead, businesses (and some individuals) wanting greater storage capacities are required to buy more drives which takes up more space, generates more heat, provides more points of failure, uses more electricity, etc. Why is this so?"

3 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What speed are most SCSI drives? by MBCook · · Score: 3, Interesting
    SCSI will be replaced by SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI. That is basically a superset of Serial ATA (IIRC). All the benefits of going from ATA->Serial ATA apply to SCSI->SAS. The smaller cables, the longer lengths, the lower voltages, etc. SCSI has had command queueing and hot-plug for a while already though.

    Everyone is going serial. USB, SAS, Serial ATA, etc. Time to invest in Kellogs.

    Oops, wrong "cerial".

    (sorry for the pun, couldn't help it).

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  2. Re:THE ANSWER by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I always find comments like this amusing. It's just not true.

    Not long ago I had to set up a several terabyte array (around 4 TB) using SCSI drives. We were constantly replacing the damn things. And this was supposedly quality hardware from Sun. Now, with as many drives as we had, there were bound to be failures. Eventually the failure rate stablized at about 1 or 2 drives per month. A rate which continues to this day, some 3 years later.

    Previous to that array I had helped set up a similar system using PC components and IDE drives. The array was actually nearly twice as big at around 7 TB but cost less than the SCSI array. Guess what? In the last 3 years only 1 drive has failed. One drive.

    Which one is more realible?

    Fuck SCSI.

  3. Reliability by MrResistor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My company was offering 180GB SCSI drives in one of our RAID products, but we had to stop due to reliability issues. There was a huge difference in reliability between the 180GB and 146GB drives (which we still offer).

    --
    Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.