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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?"
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.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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...
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!
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...
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.
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...
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!
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."
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
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
#
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.
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