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Itty Bitty SCSI Hard Drive Arrives
Bender writes "The Tech Report has a review of the new Seagate Savvio hard drive. This little SCSI drive is roughly one-third the size of the Cheetah 10K-RPM drives so popular for servers, but the benchmarks all show it performing about the same. Not only that, but noise levels and power consumption are both lower than 3.5" SCSI drives. Is it time for 1U servers to convert to 2.5" hard drives?"
"Phenomenal H4x0r powers; itty bitty living space!"
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
The IBM 336 servers that just came out use the new 2.5" SCSI drives. Instead of being able to fit 2 drives, they can fit 4. It's pretty cool stuff. The drives were slightly more expensive, but it was well worth it to us.
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the old ones go bad.
I see two awesome goodies with this:
1) I can now fit 6 HDs in my 1U server instead of only three
2) I can finally have SCSI performance on my laptop if I can ever get one with onboard SCSI. Of course, heat is still an issue...
Or is it past time?
Either way, it's time now. How many of these can we fit in a 1U front panel and still have room for
air inlets at reasonable volume, lights and switches? And preferably a video connector and two USB ports?
Shocking.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I have heard laptop harddrives tend to go bad quicker.
My only problem with this is that SCSI disks are far too expensive for me. I'd like to have one in my desktop, but it won't happen any time soon. I'll stick with SATA for now.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I think that once the trend of "bigger, faster" stops, some sanity will come to computing in general. Some applications don't need the absolutely fastest performance out there, especially when that performance comes at the price of size, power consumption and heat dissipation. Most servers would be better off with a slightly slower-performing drive that uses less power and dissipates less heat. Maybe this is the start of something beautiful ;)
Must-not-watch TV!
That's what i'm most concerned with..I have never cared much about the noise level of SCSI drives in my SERVER ROOM. It's supposed to be loud in there. Lower power consumption is a plus.
Back to failure rates, I have noticed a slip in the quality of my Seagate drives lately (IDE, SATA, and SCSI). They just seem to fail more often than they used to. I used to brag about how rock solid my Seagates were. However, I also seem to remember Seagate extending their warranty coverage to something like 5 years? Maybe this is a sign that I just had bad luck with my drives..it's been known to happen.
home of the original cupholder
Is it time for 1U servers to convert to 2.5" hard drives?"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but why would server owners want to "upgrade" to a smaller, quieter, more expensive drive if they're not even going to get a performance increase? I can easily see these replacing the older drives in new machines, but forget about upgrading...
The drives don't seem too cost effective to me. But maybe server drivers are that much more expensive. I wouldn't know.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
And I shall call it... MINI-SCSI!
that SCSI still kicks the living crap out of IDE and SATA in speed.
in your face ATA and SATA lovers.
SCSI still kicks your arse hard!
A set top box with mirrored drives and a smaller footprint.
"If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words." - Keyboards that depress their own keys, who would have thought?
For I am Cletus.The.Wonder.Sloth IPv6.5
Sounds like someone should be making specialized boot drives, 1.5" or smaller, with 5 gig capacities and super-fast seek times and rotation rates. The smaller the platter diameter, the less strain on the bearings and the more reliable they'll be at ludicrous speed.
I'm an editor for Tom's Hardware Guide (tomshardware.com), and I'd like to also point Slashdot readers over to a review we did back on September 29th featuring this Seagate Savvio (ST973401LC).
The URL to our article is http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040929/.
Our bottom line was as follows:
"Viewed in the long term, Seagate has not only entered a new market, but also heralded the end at some later date of 3.5", 10,000 rpm enterprise drives. The "big guys" get warmer, need more energy, make more noise and can rarely display their remaining speed advantages in the server environment. From a number of aspects, 2.5" models on the other hand are the more sensible option. We can only advise the competition to follow suit - and fast."
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
correct me if i'm wrong, but price along with speed and mtbf only matters in servers.
;)
who cares about one inch smaller drive that need some other hardware just to be correctly placed?
but for laptop industry it's definitely a good work. power & noise are critical. but this drive just cant get compared with usial, because of $$$/GB.
amd i must... resist..
iforonewelcomeournew2.5inchSCSIoverlords!
oooh. much better
It lookes like in the same space of a regular drive you could put two of these drives and RAID 0 them together. That would be a vast improvement in speed with the same amount of space.
Thanks, because I don't know what I'm talking about and never claimed I did...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but why would server owners want to "upgrade" to a smaller, quieter, more expensive drive if they're not even going to get a performance increase?
Perhaps they might see the value in fitting more drives into the same server enclosure?
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
The transition to 2.5" drives should begin now. The 1U server market would be a great place to start because space, airflow and power utilization are all problems with 3.5" drives in 1U servers. History tells us within a few years most drives will probably be 2.5". We are at the point where the 2.5" drives are fast enough and have enough capacity to be appropriate for the common desktop user as well as the high end server user. The price premium is currently too high for wide spread desktop adoption but that's less of an issue in the server realm.
The material, storage and transportation costs of 2.5" drives are all dramatically lower than 3.5" so in the end, they should become cheaper than 3.5" drives as the technology ages. Since laptop sales are so high the economies of scale for 2.5" drives are there. All we need now is for a company to streamline their manufacturing to bring the cost down to the levels of 3.5" drives and the en-mass transition will begin.
I for one, can't wait to have 8 drive raid array that fits in two 5.25" drive bays.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I think the push for IDE came around this time and the market died for 2.5" form factor SCSI. Nice to see it's being revived.
Wish I still had my trusty old Voyager - because it'd be fun to see if I could get one of these newfangled drives working in it with some sort of an adapter!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
The platter diameter in fast rotating disks have been smaller and smaller (thus explaining the not so great capacity compared to ATA drive that use full 3"5 platers, not rotating fast).
The common platter size went from 3"5 to 3" to 2"6 to 1"8, it was only a matter of time that they decided to package it in a smaller enclosure, the 1U market explains a lot... See that very old review (Y2K) or that Seagate whitepaper (pdf) about why smaller is faster...
Performance the same, lower noise and power consumption--this is all great, but the most important question is: is it equally robust as the full-sized version? This is essential for any even remotely serious server, when the data is worth much more than the hardware by several orders of magnitude and when downtime costs more than many man-months combined. And here the answer might be sadly "no" because anything that is smaller is inevitably easier to scratch, as any given scratch is relatively larger. Just do the math.
Unlikely. Highly unlikely. But there is another possibility: namely laptops might finally get SCSI drives to achieve much better quality and throughput than the legacy IDE we are usually left with now. I would gladly pay few hudred more to have a good and robust SCSI drive in my laptop. This seems like a very promising product. Let's see how the market will react in the following weeks. Right now it is hard to predict the future but it surely looks promising.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
THEY'RE SO CUTE I WANT ONE
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Must have the PreSCSIous!
Wouldn't we then be concerned about going plaid?
Kind of... but only on a per-drive basis.
The article talks about putting 3U of 140GB 3.5" HD RAID storage in 2U of 73GB 2.5" HD RAID storage now, for the same total HD space for the array.
Same storage space. Twice the number of drives. 2/3 the rack space. 44% power use PER DRIVE. That works out to 92% of the power of a 3U RAID stack, in a 2U RAID stack. Which means you just UPPED the power requirement for a fully-populated rack by about 40%.
Congratulations, your lower power device has you using more power. And therefore dissipating more heat in the same volume. Of course, you DO get a 50% increase in storage capacity for that.
But you still upped your total power per rack by 40% if you do that.
Remember your ear protection. The drives are quiet, but that many fans make a lot of noise.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
What's the point?
The only substantial savings with a potential dollar-value is space (there's no demonstrable monetary saving for reduced noise in a commercial server-farm).
I did RTFA -- at least the beginning and end -- and found no basis to believe that either
(a) the very slight reduction in electricity-usage, or
(b) the saving in floor-space,
will *ever* compensate for a 200% price premium --
especially when you consider
(a) the low bulk rates likely to be paid for electricity by a large hoster, and
(b) the likely in-service life in a business environment.
``the benchmarks all show it performing about the same.''
And what about reliability? Not unimportant for a server...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Every new size and speed comes with a higher price. When we upgraded from 5 1/4 full height to 3 2/1 half height, we were able to get four drives in the space of two big drives, reduce the current and have almost four times the data. WE also paid a lot more at the time though.
"If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words." - Keyboards that depress their own keys, who would have thought?
-Guns that pull their own triggers, who would have thought?
I will go 2.5", too.
The very moment i can get a 300GB 2.5" disc for under 200. Until then, 3.5" is small enough....
(my tower has still tons of unused 5.25" bays...)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
My laptop is used more as a portable workstation. PDA's are for battery powered portability!
Other posts here have mentioned that Apple used to sell it's laptops with 2.5" SCSI hard drives in them.
Let me just tell you that when I placed an IDE to SCSI adapter plate on a 2.5" laptop drive and placed it in a PowerBook Duo 2300 - there was a HUGE difference in boot time and Photoshop performance (for example) - it almost seemed to be like doubling the processor speed.
I have been disappointed that the industry decided to go to IDE, but pleased that it may be going to SATA.
I have been even more disappointed that work isn't being made to actually use flash based (no motor) hard drives a reality - as this is the main bottleneck in laptops (and really desktops)
Also, I would love to see if this could possibly be adapted to fit in older PowerBooks and would like to see performance tests on a Mac vs the Cheetah and Atlas IV as used in the tests. Maybe even test results froman Xserve.
I think a true test of performance for something like this - that isn't driver dependent - is only a good test if it can be compared under two different operating systems.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Once upon a time, Seagate listened to its server customers and continued to produce and develop 5.25 inch drives while ignoring the new 3.5 inch format. KaLock and Quantum jumped into the marketplace with 3.5 inch drives and sold them to desktop makers. Seagate lost a LOT of market share by ignoring the push to smaller drives. It seems they are being proactive in moving to 2.5 inch format early before one of the other manufacturers get the jump on them this time.
We get good government discounts so we paid about 50% more on each 146GB 10K drive
Typical...
I'm sure someone does
But really 3.5" drives fit in a 1U just fine and you can fit a good number of them in the right case too. With the size of today's drives unless you're a total media whore you probably don't need more than 1 or 2 drives even mid size ones.
Not that it doesn't have a certain cool factor. I think that they would be good in certain applications but not most. Most applications requiering small drives don't require the added benifits of SCSI and 2.5" IDE drives are cheap and common and pretty fast too.
Most web servers and even busy corporate mail servers don't need huge hard drives or access times either, if you do need these things chances are you're not too poor to spring for 3U of rack space down at the provider, it's generaly not that much money and you probably want more than 1 expansion card anyways.
I've heard the opposite. Laptop drives last longer unless you bang them around in a laptop. Used in desktop systems they go for a very long time.
My experience has been that they don't die as easily from vibration, they're quieter, they use less power (and therefore make less waste heat), and they're smaller. I have two 40GB 2.5" drives in a raid 1 array, all in a single drive bay with room to spare. I have another system in a building near some railroad tracks and it ate three 3.5" drives in a year. The 2.5" replacement has yet to fail after three years.
The only down side seems to be that they tend to be slower.
Great, now I have a new market for that old 200 MB Powerbook hard drive I have stashed away in my junk box!
(Runs at slightly less than 10,000 rpm, but who's counting?)
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
30 disks in what looks like 3Us of space for 4Gb/s of throughput.
I have been envisioning a personal hot swap RAID array that will fit into, at most, two drive bays for a long time. The SATA RAID stuff from 3ware have been tempting but require a pretty big case and add a lot of fan noise. A bit loud for my family room.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
Hmm... my Tadpole laptop has a 1Gig SCSI drive. Wonder if this would fit?
It's funny how running Solaris with a 1Gig drive makes you feel a bit cramped.
I can't be certain for sure, but I know a *big* limitation of older IDE/ATA drives was that the controller could only talk to one device at a time (per channel maybe?) My guess is SATA would not have that limitation since it's a serial interface (no bus), but I know for sure that with SCSI there is no such limitation.
IIRC, SATA is also including some of the advanced SCSI abilities - TCQ/NCQ (read more here), but still falls shy of the complete list (including Packetization, QAS, & Negotiation and Domain Validation [reference]). Not entirely sure if those increase performance in any measureable amount, but I'm sure it doesnt hurt.
Ever since I had my new 2gb drive die (yes, that long ago) I wanted nothing to do with IDE anymore and gradually phased it out of my system entirely to all SCSI. Never been disappointed. Sure, all my friends joked for being anal about it but I was more than happy (except for the prices). For most applications there was not that big of a performance increase but if you partition your system intelligently across several different physical drives you can really see a difference.
# fuser -v
#
Yes, that has always been a major benifit of SCSI vs ATA. Since all the of the work is offloaded onto the controller instead of the CPU, it takes much less resources.
I remember my friend and I had an argument of SCSI vs ATA once. My system was all SCSI (see reference) and his was all ATA (like most). I told him there is a noticable difference, he wouldn't believe me. So we did a test, we copied the entire contents of the Windows 98 CD (yes, this was my frosh year in college - '99) to our harddrive and observed. Mine finished in half the time with next to zero CPU utilization, while his took nearly 75% CPU usage. He never said another word.
Granted this was a long time ago, and CPU's are fast enough to make this performance hit much less but it still proves a point.
# fuser -v
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I know PowerBooks and obscure RISC laptops used to use SCSI drives, but I'm talking about present and future laptops: there's no way you're going to get SCSI, because it's too far out of the mainstream now.
I'm more interested in larger capacity at home without having to think much about it. I like the idea of hot-pluggable RAID1 appliances. I've seen two models. Anyone have first-hand feedback on them?
DynaBacker 2x2.5" RAID1 on FireWire/USB2
MediaBank 2x3.5" RAID1 on FireWire
[
Please help those of us who can't place the quote...!
The price disparity between IDE and SCSI wasn't always there. At the dawn of IDE, back when 200MiB was considered a large drive, IDE and SCSI drive prices were at virtual parity. If there was a difference between two otherwise identical drives, it was usually between USD$5.00 - $10.00. For a $600 drive, that's epsilon.
Sometime later -- it feels like about seven years ago -- IDE drive prices started plummeting relative to their SCSI counterparts. Now things are at the point where you'll pay three to five times more for the same storage capacity in SCSI.
About the only positive thing you can say is that SCSI prices are falling, too. Five years ago, I paid close to USD$200.00 for an 18G IBM drive. Now I can get a 75G drive for $150.00. But it's still outrageous.
SATA is no panacea, either. The last time I checked prices (very briefly) suggested that SATA drives are nearly as expensive as their SCSI counterparts.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I agree that 2U servers can be better than 1U servers, but not across the board, especially when you're paying for rack space, which can be expensive. If you don't have HUGE storage needs, a 1U server will do fine. Heck, with a Dell 1850, you can get three 146GB drives in the unit, and have close to 300GB available using RAID 5. Most 1U servers are available with dual processors now, too. You are limited in other expansion options - notably just a single PCI slot is available - but for a lot of servers, that's probably not a big deal. You can get a lot of horsepower in very little rack space and have a lot of storage available.
Again, it just depends on what the server is doing whether or not you'd save money with a 2U over 1 1U.
"How are those Quantum Bigfoots working out at your company?"
Unintentionally, you've made my point for me:
companies don't let their hardware get so outdated, so they won't own these long enough to recover the extra cost compared to 3.5" drives.
Or maybe you think that all 3.5" drives will stop production?
In that case, the 2.5" price will have already come down.
Bottom line:
as long as 2.5" carries such a large price premium over other *non-obsolete* drives, it's not worth it.
How about a hard drive that has hardware RAID inside it, one virtual HD per plate, with 2 plates for RAID 1, or three plates for RAID5.
Make one that's 100GB. I don't care about RPMs, I just want to be DAMN sure that it's not going to die on me. I also want to have low cost drives to archive my data to for long term storage. These RAID-ized drives would fit the bill perfectly.
If the disc has a greater data density, OBVIOUSLY it'll have the better data throughput than bigger hard drives.
Just because it's small. And it's also obvious that it'll require less energy to spin the plates, because they're smaller.
So what's the surprise in here? "Hey, it's faster and requires less power!" DOH, it HAS to be that way. A surprise would be if the disc was bigger but was faster and required less energy.
What about things like this
:)
You could get 16 complete individual systems with hard drives in that baby..
Currently i think you can only get 8 systems if you want individual hard drives instead of netbooting.
Latest Shipment of HP Blades, 2.5" disks on 'em.
Little guys still kick out insane amount of heat: 2 X 10KW power supplies per rack, 48VDC at 210A. *Very* carefully designed power connectors.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
When one 2.5" drive is half the physical size of a 3.5", you can fit roughly 2X the number of (what are now considered) full-size units.
Less size & less heat, means less consideration inre: airflow. Take a close look at the layout of an XServe or your favorite 1U and picture what is now drive 'width' to be drive 'length', and divide height by 2.
More air! More speed! More tiny little RAIDs!!
Not only that, but imagine a notebook with SCSI. heat issues aside, this would be cool in a drooling fantasy sort of way! Imagine a scsi RAID array in your notebook. ROFL!
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
MTBF is not a measure of how long the drive will last, it's a measure of how often you should expect a failure, given a program of maintenance and drive replacement at the end of its useful life.
/n hours, where n is the number of drives.
The end of a drive's useful life isn't when it fails, by the way. You'll probably have to pull the manufacturer's toenails to find out what their recommendation is (although maybe the warranty period might be a clue).
So if you follow the maintenance and replacement schedule, you will have a drive failure only once very hours. If you've got a slew of drives in your server room, you should expect a failure of any single drive every
So, yes, the numbers are accurate. Got a single drive? Maintain and replace it proplerly and you'll only be unpleasantly surprised once every 160 years.
=h=
The last time I compared flash storage to real disks was, admittedly, a while back; but at that time my 512 Mbyte IBM microdrive beat (in terms of seek-time or transfer rate) every flash module I had access to by a significant margin (once the microdrive was spun up). The lag while you waited for the first block you asked for was huuuuge, but if you kept it busy it was faster.
For real speed, you want battery-backed volatile RAM. The cheapest way to simulate this is to have a RAID controller stuffed full of cache, but backed by real disks.
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Blade servers might also be an interesting niche, if somebody wants to put SCSI controllers on a blade rather than IDE/SATA. For those, you really do need the small size and low power, and if SCSI makes your databases run faster, that's a big win.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They use 2.5 inch platters... Well, at least the 73GB 15krmp Ultra3 Disk I saw opened up had a platter much smaller than I expected. Certainly not most of the width of the drive, it was about 2/3 the width... All that was needed was to define the physical form factor (weel, the connector used) of the 2.5 inch SCSI drives, and slow the disks back down to reduce power consumption.
This is great news ... I'd like to see three of these drives in a small form factor desktop!
On a related note, is there such a thing as a slim SCSI CD/DVD drive? I'm interested in building my own system with a SCSI backplane and I'd like to have a slim SCSI CD-ROM use the same backplane. I've search high and low and haven't found anything.
If I had my wish there would be someone (say Toshiba) producing slim slot-loading CD/DVD RW drives with a SCA80 SCSI interface.
Am I nuts? Seems kind of crazy to have a highend system (like say an Onyx350) using SCSI for the hard disks and then also have an IDE controller and use an IDE CD-ROM.
Another reason that SCSI disks are often faster is that they often have higher RPMs. That's not because the controller makes the disk spin faster - AFAIK it's just because the disks that spin faster are usually sold to people who want maximum performance and are willing to pay for it, so they usually want SCSI controllers.
More spindles is obviously a Good Thing too, but that's not what makes SCSI fast. It would seem obvious that SCSI lets you support more spindles, so that would give you some speed advantages, but most SCSI disks seem to be smaller, so for any given capacity you often need more disks if you're using SCSI.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
SCSI in laptops? Keep dreaming.
Funny you should say that...
Behold! The Texas Instruments 4000M, produced circa 1994.
Marvel at its amazing 7" dual scan VGA screen!
Let's look at the back ports.
Let's see, what's this port here? 50 pin scsi port?
Yes indeed. 486 SX, 25mhz, 4MB RAM, 127MB HD, SVGA up to 1024x768x256 (external monitor only, LCD max 640x480x256), 16bit sound, optional 2x CD-ROM on the docking station (which takes the weight from 6lbs to 10), and onboard SCSI. Is the internal HD SCSI? I'm not entirely sure, I haven't opened it up. But it certainly hooks up to external SCSI devices just fine.
Why don't I have linux on it? Because I can't seem to find a distro that does anything useful in 4MB RAM and this thing is so old no chance of finding memory for it anymore.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
you can use the drives in blade servers. instead of putting in the standard ide notebook drives, you put in scsi drives that will fit in the same blade system. we're not very comfortable with the ide drives (but it just serves as a trash storage as of now) due to the speed. we do everything in fc for now.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Typical tricks include reordering requests to take advantage of disk postition information that the CPU doesn't know about.
It means that the file processor cannot be sure that the older data may be lost but the newer ones are written. If so, it may destroy the Lazy Writes feature (In FreeBSD) and/or journaling file systems and require either UPS or FSCK. Both are the burden.
It seems to me that the point the author of the review was trying to make was that "sure these drives are slower, but they are small, so it does not matter". It seems to me that in most applications that require SCSI, they require a high transfer rate. I would think this would matter for workstations and high workload SCSI arrays. This drive would still be usefull for such things as desktop replacement laptops, even ultra low power servers. I don't think this drive is idea for large RAID arraws, as the article seems to focus on.
But what about the Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini?
The parallel data lab at Carnegie Mellon has a fascinating paper on Power and reliability benefits from arrays of 1" disks in laptops instead of a single 2.5" disk.
The PDL has a ton of RAID-related resources, but their site hasn't been updated in a few years. I'd love to see the math redone with modern hardware specs and modern RAM prices.
I think what we may see as a trend in the next few years is the switch from 3.5" 1/3 height hard drives to 2.5" 1/4 height hard drives with Serial ATA connectors as desktop computer hard drives in the next few years.
There are a number of advantages going to 2.5" drives: 1) they run quite a bit cooler than 3.5" hard drives; 2) the power consumption is much lower than 3.5" hard drives; and 3) it will allow even smaller-sized BTX form factor system cases.
I think we may see a surge of interest in 2.5" 1/4 height hard drives for desktop use due to the potential to dramatically reduce the size of the BTX form factor system case. With today's very small Serial ATA connectors, 2.5" 1/4 height Serial ATA drives with storage capacities in the 200-300 GB range is within technical reach.
Not sure they're not useful in Raid Arrays, having small, energy efficient, drives allows you to cram a lot more drives in the same space.
This allows for more parallel channels into which the data is flowing at any one time, with the array spending less time waiting for the drives to finish writing.
Sure, you'll probably find an array that reaches the same perfs using 3.5' drives, but it'll probably take 3x more Us.
When you're renting colo space, it can make the difference between renting half a rack and renting 2 full racks.
They may also open the possibility for vendors to build "storage blades", which I reckon would fit a niche very nicely.
Not everyone wants to have a blade chassis with a couple of active blades, and an external (mostly empty) disk array. Sure they'd have to be fairly creative to build a blade which still allows for hot swapping (2-3 slots large maybe?).
The real advantage of having your storage inside the blade beeing that your storage is directly connected to the backplane, instead of being on the other side of a SCSI cable which might slow things down.
A few years down the line, we may well be able to buy blade chassis where you have a storage blade (or storage area), a storage array management blade (to allow servers to boot from the Raid Array), and space for quite a few, now diskless, servers.
Isn't Native Command Queuing just the same thing? It's now on ATA disks, too, but all chipsets doesn't support it.
Who is John Galt?
Yes it can. Infact Tagged Command Queueing is what you want if you want a block device which actually tells you what it has written and what it hasn't - something you don't get with write caching commonly used with IDE-drives.
If only 2.5" drives weren't so expensive.
Lets hope the drive does not really use 141 watts at idle, this is a little bit steep for a 2.5" drive - most laptop drives only use about 5 Watts at idle!
To put it another way thats 28 Amps at 5V. I hope this is off by an order of magnitude !
That's a good point however I don't know that a small SCSI device would be needed, most small formfactor machines are single user and at best doing video capture which SATA is great for, a 2.5" SATA drive would make for some nice DVR applications.
No, it cannot. When the drive writes the reordered data and the power fail occurs you have no power to query the drive any more. So my point is still valid.
Yeah, IBM drives had a bit of a bad reputation, but the 6 year old laptop that acts as my home server (and part of the hifi rack) is running a 3 year old disk 7x24 with no trouble yet.
Regarding Dell vs IBM, IBM probably put a lot more effort into fixing stuff down and testing the results -experience paying off. laptops are all the PCs IBM really do these days , so get a lot of focus.
Whereas dell play off between the various Taiwanese ODMs (compal and the like) and go with whoever comes in lowest price "with an acceptable AFR".
Their notion of acceptable may differ from yours; an HDD loss is a cost to them, a disaster to anyone who didnt back up.
----
I toasted a laptop once. Always pull out the battery before you do memory swaps, as it may just be in standby...
Actually a long time ago, in a galaxy filled with old sk00l .
:
p or ts/
geeks the laptops had micro-channel SCSI . It was not common,
but there were quite a few
15th divided category from top of page
http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/users/olawlor/ref/mac_
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"