SCSI vs. SATA In a File Server?

turboflux asks: "I'm currently in the process of replacing an aging file server with something more robust. Company-wide, there will be about 100 people who could be using this server, but I don't imagine there being more than 50 concurrent users. Right now, I'm torn between spending alot on SCSI hardware, much like our other servers, or spending less, but getting more space, with SATA II drives. Whatever I decide, the server will be setup with a RAID 1+0 array for the numerous benefits it offers. Does Slashdot have opinions or suggestions on performance, reliability, and stability?"

Comments

Re:I'd say SCSI

[GigsVT]

OK, hear mine then.

We have several terabytes of SATA storage at work to hold our main business-critical digital asset archive.

We've been using a ATA/SATA disk-only strategy for over 5 years now. It's worked great, and eliminated our slow and unreliable tape robot, which has greatly improved productivity.

Back in 1999/2000 SCSI wasn't an option for the main archive because a terabyte of SCSI would have broken the bank. We went ATA back then. It was a mess trying to route 24 ATA cables in a case, I admit. SATA fixes that nicely.

We keep three copies of our data, two onsite and one offsite. We use rsync-incremental snapshots to do disk-based incremental backups. Because the cost of SATA is less than 1/3rd the cost of SCSI, we get a high reliability solution for less than the price of a single SCSI RAID.

One more advantage of SATA is that the disks are so cheap, it's easy to just replace all of them every two or three years. The disks you replace them with generally are twice as large after 2 or 3 years, so every cycle your RAIDs get more reliable as the number of disks is slashed in half.

Most companies wouldn't replace every SCSI disk every two years, it would cost way too much. And considering the slow pace of SCSI size growth, you wouldn't see as much gain, a double hit against SCSI.

So basically unless you need the excellent latency performance of SCSI, higher than even the WD Raptor can offer, I see no compelling reason to use SCSI for anything anymore.