But will it be the smallest bottleneck, might the # of CPUs (specially in
Blade systems) not be another potential bottleneck ?
I was going chime in last week regarding the warranty, maybe Compaq or
some other only give you a 1 year warranty, but most drives these days (even
PATA) have 3 or 5 year warranty.
And it is true what Amer said, we had a notorious SCSI HD failure rate on
our IBM X350, X360 and X365 servers--blame Hitachi.
------------------------------
*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *Jeff Pitsch
*Sent:* Sunday, October 01, 2006 8:16 PM
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [THIN] Re: SATA drives
Performance drop. Price is fine, reliablity maybe, but performance is
much worse than SCSI. you are putting in a bottleneck that is unneeded.
You aren't supposed to create your own bottleneck in a TS environment.
Jeff Pitsch
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
Provision Networks VIP
Forums not enough?
Get support from the experts at your business
http://jeffpitschconsulting.com
On 9/30/06, Amer Karim <amerk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I agree with you wrt to SATA being appropriate dependant on what they
> are going to be used for, and how. However, regarding published failure
> rates and reliability figures - as far as I'm concerned, they're
> meaningless. We went through a wonderful period of about 2 years where we
> were experiencing a failure rate of about 80% (note the missing preceding
> decimal) on brand new U320 SCSI drives (from various manufacturers) - almost
> every one of them brand new, and most within 6 to 12 months of use;
> including one reputation breaking case where every single drive for a new
> SBS server, 6 drives in RAID-1 and RAID-5 w/ hot-spare, failed the burn in;
> we RMA'd those, and when we got the replacements, all of those failed
> again. By then we had swapped out the system board, power supplies, gone
> through 4 different RAID controllers because the Seagate chaps were
> convinced the drives were being blown by the surrounding hardware. We
> decided to switch to IBM drives instead - and had half of them die on
> us. Turned out the problems were being caused by a bug in the drives'
> firmware. We're still seeing a failure rate on U320 SCSI drives, both 10K
> and 15K flavours, which is far greater than it used to be 3 years ago -
> about 1 in 20 on average, and we've RMA'd more SCSI drives in the last 3
> years than we did in the preceding 10.
>
> Thus, IMO, figures on failure rates and reliability are moot - one bug
> in a firmware revision and that much vaunted integrity and reputation is mud
> as far as a client is concerned. I agree there are some applications where
> SCSI performance is still a necessity - but I no longer consider them the
> holy grail, and if a SATA drive goes south I can replace it in however long
> it takes me to get to the client's site - they're cheap enough, and
> available enough. Keeping my clients systems up and running is what they
> pay me for - and redundancy does a far better job of that than hardware
> 'reliability' and 'failure' figures.
>
> I will also state that up until 2 years ago, I would have, and did, walk
> away from any client who did not want to spend the money on putting SCSI
> drives in their servers. I'm confident enough in the newer SATA/SAS
> technologies that I now consider them viable, and in certain cases
> preferable, alternatives to SCSI.
>
> Regards,
> Amer Karim
> Nautilis Information Systems
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Roger Riggins
> Sent: September 29, 2006 10:30 PM
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Re: SATA drives
>
> SATA can be an alternative for SCSI if you want cheaper, but can accept
> slower and less reliable storage. We found a home for them in our D2D2T
> solution, but those specs were acceptable for that project. Everyone's
> requirements are different for every project. Personally, if I'm
> responsible for the equipment or my reputation is on the line, then I'm
> going to recommend what I believe to be the best. If I have to
> compromise integrity for price, then I make sure that management
> understands that. I keep an "I told you so" in my back pocket. :)
>
> Check this out--
>
> Seek times:
>
> SAS Barracuda ES: 8.5/9.5
> SAS NL35: 8.0/9.0
>
> SCSI/SAS Cheetah 15k: 3.5/4.0
> SCSI/SAS Savvio 10k.2: 3.8/4.4
>
>
> Sustained transfer rate:
>
> SAS Barracuda ES: up to 78 Mbytes/sec
> SAS NL35: up to 65 Mbytes/sec
>
> SCSI/SAS Cheetah 15k: up to 125 Mbytes/sec
> SCSI/SAS Savvio 10k.2: up to 85 Mbytes/sec
>
>
> Annualized Fail Rate at 24x7 operation:
>
> SAS Barracuda ES: .73%
> Others: not listed, probably worse since the Barracuda is supposed to be
>
> their most reliable SATA or probably not rated for 24x7 operation
>
> SCSI/SAS Cheetah 15k: .62%
> SCSI/SAS Savvio 10k.2: .55%
>
>
> So from the numbers, it's safe to say that the SCSI/SAS seek times are
> almost half of SATA. Additionally, the above SATA drives are up to 25%
> more likely to fail than a SCSI/SAS drive. That's if you get these new
> ones that are supposed to be more reliable than the others!
>
> Here's an interesting link from the makers of the Barracuda. ;)
>
> http://www.seagate.com/products/interface/sata/targetapp.html
>
> So the bottom line is that SATA is a viable alternative for SCSI/SAS,
> but mostly for specific solutions/projects or very small shops.
>
> Good luck,
>
> Roger Riggins
> Network Administrator
> Lutheran Services in Iowa
> w: 319.859.3543
> c: 319.290.5687
> http://www.lsiowa.org
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Amer Karim
> Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 6:39 PM
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Re: SATA drives
>
> The Seagate 3GB/s SATA drives (Barracuda ES) lines have a 5-year
> warranty - and, for the price, I can put 8 of those in a server with
> RAID-10 and RAID-5 with 2 hot-spares for a fraction of the cost of SCSI
> for equivalent capacity. In other words, I'd have to disagree with the
> comments about SATA not being a viable alternative to SCSI/SAS. And
> throw in an SAS RAID controller, and you've made the migration to SAS
> drives down the road a fairly simple thing as well. The SATA disks
> being referred to in those articles are older tech and better suited for
> desktop computers, rather than servers - IMHO.
>
> Regards,
> Amer Karim
> Nautilis Information Systems
>
>
>
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