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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?"
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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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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?
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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.
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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 ;)
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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.
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And I shall call it... MINI-SCSI!
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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!
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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...
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Must have the PreSCSIous!
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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