OT: disk speed

Hi,
We are looking to add a new server to our domain. It will
primarily be used for storage. I am looking at getting a
RAID 1 controller with 2 250GB drives. What is the main
difference between SATA and SCSI drives. I know the SATA
doesn't spin as fast but is it that noticable? The cost
difference is pretty large. I can save over 1k by going
with SATA. I originally was thinking about getting a
storage server (storage server 2003 OS, can't run
applications) but down the line I may need to move
sqlServer to this new server (not a ton of people hitting
it, just ~10 developers. I know I will need to purchase a
seperage copy of sqlServer). Our SBServer is a SCSI drive
so I can't really compare anything. If the server is
primarily storage, do you think a SATA drive would be
sufficient?

(the vendors always push the higher end stuff so just
looking for an objective viewpoint)

Thanks

Henry
Tue Mar 01 18:02:16 CST 2005

"Speed" is lot more than Disk speed,
....and you'll want to be looking at long term reliability and
redundancy.

IMHO Sata Drives are just Desktop drives, -not- Server Drives, and worse
some are just IDE Drives with Piggy-Back Interpolating Controllers and
not Native SATA.

For Server storage go For the higher Reliability SCSI, and SCSI
Controllers with Onboard Battery Backup to enable Write Caching.

So, just what -IS- your data worth ?

Also, RAID 1+0 ( or second best 0+1 ) is better than RAID 1 as it will
give you redundancy

If you must go SATA go for Native Sata with NCQ (Native Command Queuing)

--
Henry Craven {SBS-MVP}
CI Information Technology
----------------------------------------------------
Melbourne SBS Users Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/melb-SBSusers/


"nic" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:2f9101c51e7e$23788260$a601280a@phx.gbl...
> Hi,
> We are looking to add a new server to our domain. It will
> primarily be used for storage. I am looking at getting a
> RAID 1 controller with 2 250GB drives. What is the main
> difference between SATA and SCSI drives. I know the SATA
> doesn't spin as fast but is it that noticable? The cost
> difference is pretty large. I can save over 1k by going
> with SATA. I originally was thinking about getting a
> storage server (storage server 2003 OS, can't run
> applications) but down the line I may need to move
> sqlServer to this new server (not a ton of people hitting
> it, just ~10 developers. I know I will need to purchase a
> seperage copy of sqlServer). Our SBServer is a SCSI drive
> so I can't really compare anything. If the server is
> primarily storage, do you think a SATA drive would be
> sufficient?
>
> (the vendors always push the higher end stuff so just
> looking for an objective viewpoint)
>
> Thanks

Jim
Tue Mar 01 22:25:58 CST 2005

15K scsi can cost $1,000 more than 10K scsi. SATA drives are pretty
cheap compared to any scsi.

I have some a few SATA Adaptec Raid1 servers. They are not as fast as
scsi based servers but for serving small files of less than 10 megs it
seems adequate. They are faster than IDE based Raid1 but no benchmarks
to quantify. Tom's Hardware does has some articles that can
muddy/clarify the debate. For folks wanting to do heavy duty sql I
still vote for scsi.

Dual Xeon, 2 gigs ram and 2 Raid 1 arrays with 15K hard drives is a
fairly fast server. The joker that specced it thought is was pretty
nice. I guess since the client uses a server for 5 or more years it
should be fast enough for a while.

"nic" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>We are looking to add a new server to our domain. It will
>primarily be used for storage. I am looking at getting a
>RAID 1 controller with 2 250GB drives. What is the main
>difference between SATA and SCSI drives. I know the SATA
>doesn't spin as fast but is it that noticable? The cost
>difference is pretty large. I can save over 1k by going
>with SATA. I originally was thinking about getting a
>storage server (storage server 2003 OS, can't run
>applications) but down the line I may need to move
>sqlServer to this new server (not a ton of people hitting
>it, just ~10 developers. I know I will need to purchase a
>seperage copy of sqlServer). Our SBServer is a SCSI drive
>so I can't really compare anything. If the server is
>primarily storage, do you think a SATA drive would be
>sufficient?
>
>(the vendors always push the higher end stuff so just
>looking for an objective viewpoint)
>
>Thanks

Jim B. SBS MVP