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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?"
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!
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
We get good government discounts so we paid about 50% more on each 146GB 10K drive. That's negligible when the total cost of the server is over $10K and a decent fibre NAS runs > $20K.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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.
My company just paid around $500 for a 146GB version. The prices they have listed there are insanely high.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I must say, though, now having seen the tests and, more importantly, the photographs, that those look *nothing* like a notebook (IDE) hard drive, with their aluminum foil-quality shell almost no real structure. They look like 3.5" hard drives scaled down: still rugged, just small.
I say bring it on! Of course, given my (and my client's) needs, I don't buy rackmount servers... :)
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
More drives equals more performance. A six drive RAID-5 will outperform a three drive RAID-5. With smaller drives you can fit more of them in a 1U system.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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
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...
Up until 1995, all Mac laptops used 2.5" SCSI drives. They switched to IDE drives at about the same time as they switched to PowerPC chips.
Naw, you just move the virtual machines over to secondary systems that have the spare capacity, bring down the box, upgrade it, move the virtual machines back onto it, all without shutting anything down. See VMWare ESX, Vmotion and VirtualCenter for details on their site. Course, to take advantage of moving the machines without shutting them down you need a SAN on the backend. It's mainframes all over again.
The infamous RocketDrive RocketDrive.
Or you can use Flash drives, less expensive but a bit slower.
Actually, the performance gain I saw in SCSI was simply the fact that the SCSI card took care of large amounts of my I/O processing, leaving my CPU free to do, you know, CPU stuff.
SCSI's advantage is not solely in the performance of its devices.
When I'm burning CDs on my IDE-based CD burner, it chews up nearly all my system resources on my puny 1.8GHz processor. But on my old 486DX2/66MHz system, with 5 SCSI disks (no RAID) and SCSI CDROM, I could have all these lit up without any drain to my system. Do I miss those days or what. <sigh>
30 disks in what looks like 3Us of space for 4Gb/s of throughput.
When I'm burning CDs on my IDE-based CD burner, it chews up nearly all my system resources on my puny 1.8GHz processor.
:-)
Try enabling DMA and suchlike, so the IDE chipset takes care of large amounts of your I/O processing.
Between SuSE 8.1 and 9.0, my PC's IDE chipset gained DMA support for writing CDs and stuff. The machine went from being unusable when writing a CD to taking up a few percent of processor time, on my punier 1.1GHz processor. Okay, it's not SCSI performance by any means (although it talks SCSI over the IDE bus, heh) but it's still a big improvement.
Actually, the last SCSI device I bought new was a 230MB hard disk for my Atari ST, for a few hundred pounds. I take it things have improved since then.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Having been involved with notebook engineering in the past, I can assure you that the notebook drives -esp. the hitachi ones- are well engineered for the weight.
The biggest issue with causes of failures is how well they are mounted, and that is where different ODM designs can vary wildly; or even the same ODM design with a different vendor's case round it.
Some drives were only mounted on one side, so every shock got amplified. Others were in "quick swap on failure" units that almost guaranteed failure, they were so unsupportive of shock. Same goes for hot swap CD/DVD drive trays, BTW.
The emergence of "Consumer grade" laptops has actually done a lot to improve the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). These ones dont have so many hotswap options, but instead can lock down everything to be sure it stays supportive.
We have also done tests shipping packaged systems around by fedex with a logging accelerometer in place of an HDD. you get some interesting figures, but all well within the safety range of things.
One tip though, always tuck the laptop in behind a seat safely before you go driving down windy back roads doing italian-style "optimistic overtakes". Some things are way outside the envelope.
Yes: check out RackForce
They do 'DDS' servers under several plans, the cheaper the plan, the more virtual servers share the same physical hardware. At the top end, you get the whole server yourself.
The big plus with this system is that they can migrate your server to new hardware by copying a single file or directory - and they will, downtime for server upgrades is in the matter of seconds (copy, turn off old VM, turn on new VM), and you can migrate to new plans with the same ease.
The VM technology is SWSoft's Virtuozzo which comes with some features to prevent 1 VM from taking over the entire hardware - you can set it so each VM will be guaranteed a minimum amount of resources.
Did you read the parent?
The way I read that, the government price is 1.5 times more than regular drives, not 3 times.
That's actually a great deal for them.
They're getting the new drives for 1/2 price what others pay.