On Friday 03 September 2004 11:26, Ken Schneider wrote:
...
I did follow the link but the fingers overroad what the brain was thinking. Yes it is a 3ware controller, not a promise controller but the rest remains the same. SCSI is generally better and faster then SATA. Why do you think SCSI drives have a 5 year warranty and most IDE have one? because they are of better quality. And yes anything get break on day one. And you can always buy SCSI drives that are faster then even the fastest SATA drives.
The performance analysis here is not trivial, in part because SCSI is a bus and SATA is point-to-point. SCSI only becomes faster than SATA at the Ultra 160 level, and then it's only really faster when there's a need to concurrently transfer from more than one disk at a time. Since SATA is not a "bus" in the sense that multiple devices can be attached, the transfer bandwidth doesn't get shared until you get to the SATA controller level or to the point where the controller connects to the system bus (be that PCI or some more direct attachment to the ICH, as is used with on-board SATA support in some chipsets such as those incorporating the Intel 82801-series chips). And keep in mind that there _are_ 10,000 RPM SATA drives available. While I generally accept that longer warrantees are generally associated with better quality ... generally. But it's far from a sure thing. I know the context here is a server, which definitely suggests much higher I/O demand than a desktop system, but I just wanted people to realize that for desktop purposes, SATA now is pretty competitive in terms of performance for most people's use with SCSI. For what it's worth, I've always insisted on the fastest SCSI interface and drives I can get at the time I put a system together. Right now I'm running a dual channel Ultra 160 controller (Adaptec 39160) and 10,000 RPM drives. In the future, I may be willing to go the SATA route, though I would probably not be satisfied with only two SATA channels, as is still pretty common for on-board SATA support.
Ken Schneider unix user since 1989 linux user since 1994 SuSE user since 1998 (5.2)
Randall Schulz -- Unix user since 1977