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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.
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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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Actually, now you can fit 10 drives in 1U instead of 4.
SCSI in laptops? Keep dreaming.
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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Grab an Apple Powerbook 100 series laptop.
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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If I recall correctly, very early Powerbook (Duo 200 series?) had 2.5" SCSI hard drives.
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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
Typical...
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.
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