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?"

Comments

1U Servers To 2.5" Drives

[TheFlyingGoat]

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.

Re:1U Servers To 2.5" Drives

[tmasssey]

I just read about those machines about 2 weeks ago on IBM's site. When I saw them I thought, "Oh crap: IDE notebook drives with a SCSI chip stuck on them in a server. What *were* they thinking?!?"

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... :)

Interesting

[MasTRE]

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 ;)

Failure rate?

[seagar]

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.

Re:Failure rate?

[Jucius Maximus]

" Yea, I'm sure their drives have an average lifespan of 159 years. Next caller."

This is a common misconception. The MTBF refers to the time before a failure in group of drives. So if you have 120 of these 1,400,000 MTBF drives in your server room, then you can expect to go 1 year, 121 days (on average) between replacing drives. That should help you plan your IT spending budget too.

Or perhaps a company deployed 5000 laptops, all with these drives in them: You can expect to go about 12 days between failures. Back up your drives, people! Even with SCSI-level MTBF numbers, statistically failures are not all that uncommon.

Re:Perfect...

[Wesley Felter]

Actually, now you can fit 10 drives in 1U instead of 4.

SCSI in laptops? Keep dreaming.

It's time to go 2.5"

[egarland]

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.

160 years MTBF

[kclittle]

1.4e6/(24*365.24) = 159.71 years, to be picky about it. I see these figures on modern drives and, frankly, I don't believe it. But, that doesn't keep me from drooling over them (which would proably shorten the MTBF, yes? :-)

Re:Perfect...

[Ford Prefect]

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. :-)