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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?"
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?
I have heard laptop harddrives tend to go bad quicker.
Actually, now you can fit 10 drives in 1U instead of 4.
SCSI in laptops? Keep dreaming.
How much is slightly? The article says that these drives cost 3 times as much per drive ($447 vs $150).
The drives don't seem too cost effective to me. But maybe server drivers are that much more expensive. I wouldn't know.
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1) just by changing the case (rather inexpensive) you can have better drives than these.
2) and what exactly is SCSI performance ? do you have an array of disks in your laptop ? Last time I checked, virtually all laptops held one single hdd, which means that you wouldn't see *any* difference between ATA and SCSI interfaces. So, SCSI on laptops means basically sticking in an expensive controller and disks without any performance gain over the cheaper disks. Do your math here.
BTW: the parent post should have been modded "un-informed" instead of interesting. So, moderators, do your job and push this thread down, to prevent spreading even further the urban legend of the superiority of SCSI in all scenarios.
Rack space costs money too. The monthy costs of 2U worth of space VS 1U is enough to warent the cost of the extra smaller drives in many cases.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
You can already do that with SSDs (Solid State Drive). Essentially DRAM backed up with a battery. Very fast, no moving parts, expensive as heck.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Wait a second... why would you want a more rugged casing on a drive that's in a machine bolted to a rack in a machine room somewhere than you do in a machine you're walking around with all day? Isn't that a bit counterintuitive?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
Only if the density is higher. You'll note SCSI drives tend to lag a bit behind IDE for capacity, and 2.5" drives lag behind a LOT. Not that it matters, any scratch of note means a dead drive. The days when one could live with a bad sector or three are long gone. Once SMART reports your drive is using its spare sectors, it's time to place an order for a replacement.
Market separation. There's nothing stopping mfr's from making high quality, high speed IDE drives. They just don't want to. If SCSI hits mainstream there will be pressure to lower the cost of SCSI, which will fuck up their profit models. Right now, if you're serious about storage, you bend over and take it with a smile as you have no other choice. SCSI-on-the-desktop/laptop gives SCSI users a choice.
I for one quite like the SCSI zealots subsidising my cheap 256GB IDE drives, thank you
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
However, don't forget that the biggest reason notebook hard drives are not more solidly built is because of weight, not size. When every notebook builder is struggling to gain fractions of *ounces*, every bit of extra steel on a hard drive counts. Hence, the cheap, flimsy structure.
Have you ever seen a notebook hard drive? All of the ones I've seen in the last three years have a warning on them: do not push on drive! The top of the drive is little more than stiff foil. If you push on it, it will break the drive.
So, no, I do not want a part specifically engineered to be as thin and flimsy as possible in my server. I don't really want them in my notebook, either, but I don't have a choice there...
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