Enterprise-class ATA Drives 319
dfung writes "This has been mindlessly discussed many times before here, but Western Digital has now introduced real enterprise-class ATA drives with SCSI-like performance specs and 30% lower price. So now you can buy a real 10K rpm ATA drive. Interestingly enough, they mention the reason for the traditional difference in price between ATA and SCSI which I never have seen mentioned here - it has to do with testing costs, not controller electronics|platter quality|etc. Another interesting tidbit is that 160 million ATA drives were sold last year. I saw about 2 million of them stacked up in the aisles at Fry's Electronics yesterday, but that sure is a lot of drives."
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Nice rack!
Seems like a good idea (Score:2, Insightful)
- It's going to be a real plus when running IDE-raid solutions too. Esp. if you compare the prizes to the SCSI solutions.
GO WD go, hopefully, these drives will be of higer quality than their recent IDE drives that have been breaking by the ton a week too...
-- 040
Re:Seems like a good idea (Score:2, Informative)
Hardware Guide had an article on software raid performance on here [tomshardware.com] (this is about Windows 2000, but anyway).
Re:Seems like a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's Xserve comes to mind.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple's Xserve comes to mind.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Both the Xserve and Xserve RAID [apple.com] use ATA drives. Why wouldn't they benefit from faster ATA?
the reason for difference in price (Score:4, Interesting)
That was indeed the most cedible information I have ever read in the ATA/SCSI flame-war.
Also, there seems to be a five year warranty coming up on the Serial-ATA from Western Digital!!!
Re:the reason for difference in price (Score:3, Insightful)
Think on how ridiculous this is:
No-one in their right minds deploys business-critical storage with anything less than some sort of RAID protection, where the failure of a single drive is no big deal.
Customers purchasing IDE drives, i.e. home users, small biz, are much more likely to have no protection, and as such lose everything if the drive breaks!
Think about it
Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
That's such a crock. I can pay about $200 for a 180GB ATA drive. I just paid over $1200 each for several 180GB SCSI drives, and that was the best price I could find.
So, they're saying that the thousand dollar difference was because my drive was individually tested? Heck, I'll revolutionize the SCSI drive market by cutting the manufacturers' costs in half by personally testing each drive at my new business for only $500 each! C'mon, it costs them $50 to test the drive.
Some of the thousand dollars goes into better parts, these are good, fast drives, but most of the difference is pure profit because they know SCSI is better, that the server market needs SCSI, that people need tons of storage, and that they can collude to get those prices.
Yes, I do think the FTC ought to check into it.
Re:the reason for difference in price (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to get someone in trouble, there are any number of easier ways to do it. You're gonna sneak a file onto someones hard drive, then at some later time somehow induce a hard drive failure so the drive has to be sent back for warranty service, then notify the authorities anonymously and hope they take you seriously and hope they can find the drive and hope the file is stll there.
And that scenario is enough to keep you from buying a cheap, fast, big new hard drive with a five year warranty.
I dunno, maybe your enemies are much more devious and persistant then mine.
30%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:30%? (Score:5, Informative)
From time to time I've seen drive logic fail (as opposed to surface errors), which often brings down the entire SCSI channel. With raid5, you can only afford to lose one drive and perhaps a couple hot spares. Certainly not 14 drives in one shot. SCSI is many pinned, and SCSI raid adapters are designed to have many drives on each channel. One drive per interface is extremely costly and impractical. In this respect, SATA is more robust.
"If one drive per channel serial interfaces are so good, why weren't the used in the first place," you might wonder. Modern high clock rate microcontroller technology permits much higher frequency twisted pair serial interfaces that can offer superior bandwidth to older parallel, ribbon cable interfaces. If SCSI were being designed today it would look something like firewire, which I'm sure you're not biased against. Don't be fooled by the ATA moniker.
Re:30%? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahhhh to be able to look at the toys and not pay attention to the price tag again *sigh*
Try purchasing a couple 6 terabyte [raidzone.com] file servers and then ask yourself how much a non-"kinda hackish" solution is worth. $10,000? $20,000?
Re:30%? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see you have 14 drives on a single IDE chain and then do a copy between drives.
Or how about the simple fact that you can get SCSI Ultra 360 that are nearly 3 times faster than anything you can buy that is IDE.
Or the fact that My SCSI drives come with 5 year warranty's The only SCSI drive I have ever had fail are reallllllly old. and EVERY scsi drive I have in service (over 120 of them) haven't been spun down or sat idle for over 4 years.
The new IDE might be close, but until they get proof of reliability under their belt like SCSI has It's only a watch and see item.
SCSI is known to be bullet proof and faster. enterprise ATA is not. so the next 5 years they had better not pull an IBM and produce the worlds crappiest drives.
Re:30%? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:30%? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's just plain wrong. I've had batches of SCSI drives with high failure rates. When the maker screws up the glue and heads start falling off, scsi versus ide doesn't enter into it. SCSI cabling, termination and a shared bus can also be problematic as can subtle diffs in SCSI protocol implementation.
The drawbacks of IDE have historically been: not offered on the 10-15krpm drives, cruddy cables, can't do >1 drive per channel, many broken implementations, lower qa standards.
Oldtime drives had no digital hardware onboard. It made sense to integrate things to the point where the device can locate its own sectors, but it's arguable that SCSI puts too much on the drive. I'm in favor of the 3ware Escalade style architecture where each drive has an independent channel, and is treated as a relatively dumb device.
With the improved cabling, qa and spindle speeds, I think we're about to see some really rockin' IDE storage systems.
Re:30%? (Score:3, Informative)
on the other hand a SCSSI drive gets the same request and reads 1, crosses two to read 3 crosses one to read 4, crosses one track to read 5 and crosses two trackes to read 7 for a total of 6 tracks crossed.
the SCSSI disk using the elevator technique allways win when all other things are equal; and usualy the SCSSI disk is built with other advantages.
Need larger sizes... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Need larger sizes... (Score:2)
Re:Need larger sizes... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Need larger sizes... (Score:2)
Re:Need larger sizes... (Score:2, Informative)
I bought one when the were 130usd for a 120GB/8MB version, and I like it. If I had to get another one, and the price was more than 10usd difference , depending on capacity, I would get the normal version.
Re:Need larger sizes... (Score:2)
Re:Need larger sizes... (Score:2, Insightful)
Question about spindle speed (Score:2)
Re:Question about spindle speed (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Question about spindle speed (Score:2)
Two major things:
I'm sure I forgot something, feel free to add stuff
Re:Question about spindle speed (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh. Vastly increased heat production. 10k RPM drives get quite hot!
Re:Question about spindle speed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question about spindle speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm, no. Read the article. The drive has a capacity of 36 GB. So the data tranfer rate will be slower, compared to a current high-capacity drive. Server drives are optimized for access time, not transfer rate. That's the reason why they keep increasing the rotational speed, at the cost of data density: rotational latency (the time a R/W head has to wait until a certain sector passes underneath it after it was positioned above the right track) is decreased.
Higher transfer rates are reached by putting multiple drives in a RAID configuration. That's also the reason why you'll not see any benefit from putting a single server drive in your desktop PC.
Re:Question about spindle speed (Score:2)
Access time is two components: seek time, the time to get the heads to the right track, and rotational latency, the wait until the right bit of oxide spins under the heads. Rotational latency is, on average, half a rotation, so faster spindle speed means lower rotational latency.
Faster spindle speed also moves the bits under the heads faster, so that you get faster data rates on/off the disk once the right bit of oxide has got into position. However, data rates off disk are already so high that for normal file I/O transfers, the data transfer time is 1% of the total transfer time. Of course, for large streaming transfers, the dta transfer time becomes much larger and the savings because of a faster spindle speed more worthwhile.
More 'Spin' than fact... (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Testing time is a function of prodn. capacity. Obviously there'd be 10 times as many ATA drives as SCSI.
3. Spindle speed and drive interface - any connection?
More marketing spin here than drive spin. Probably enough to win the desktop PC market. If MS can spin, WD can do better. What next? ATA-XP drives specially tuned for XP??
God is an Anonymous Coward....jkrise
Reliable HDD (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, stay away from these (Score:2)
For reliable home use, get a SLOW-spinning drive, preferably one with fluid spindle bearings, since those seem less inclined to wear into a higher-friction mode (at least that's what I think is happening when non-FDB drives get noisy over time). Maybe even a laptop drive, since those run the coolest. Whatever you do, expect occasional failures, so backup frequently.
Re:If anything, stay away from these (Score:3, Funny)
Is the popular view of WD drives wrong? Or are all the manufacturers just as bad these days in the consumer space?
Re:If anything, stay away from these (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reliable HDD (Score:3, Informative)
The Seagate Barracuda IV seems to be about the most reliable ATA drive about at the moment, with the assumption that the Barracuda V will behave similarly. While Maxtor (creeping bad sectors) and WD (crappy bearings) seem to have some common problems which crop up a lot, the 'cuda has been around for a while and I've heard nothing but good about it (aside from some RAID issues, which they fixed in the 'cuda V); from significantly smaller return rates in places which sell various makes in largeish quantities, to the simple lack of "my Seagate is failing!" posts on various forums.
Not very scientific, but certainly compelling evidence
Either way, I think a big issue with drives these days is heat; a lot of cases have the 3.5" bays in a deadzone where heat can build up quickly, and a lot of heat can massively reduce the lifetime of a drive. Either get a case where you can put them right at the bottom, near the air inlets and with lots of space around them for the air to circulate, or actively cool them. I've seen drives mounted in the top bays run at 50c which ran at 30c when mounted at the bottom; where do *you* think it's most likely to achieve and exceed it's 5 year design life?
heh; common misconseption (Score:5, Interesting)
being IN the semiconductor test industry, it's really interesting how rarely does people really consider the necessity, and challenges, let alone costs, in testing.
few people realize that, for example (I am saying this example purely based on speculation, but a well-formed one) that the athlon MP chip cost difference is in a large part the extra test they run on it. You see - testing cost money, anything that would make test run longer means that more money has been spent on that part "making" it. One of the things the test industry is always talking about is speeding up testing, as a way to reduce testing costs.
aaanyway... next time anybody look at some nifty / advanced gadget, think to yourself "how the heck do they test THAT?" especially with things that have fast interfaces or embedded components...
anyway. erm - to stay on topic: ATA drives could handle 10k platters; I think the point about scsi has always been the more "industrial scalability / reliability / throughput / whatever" that's the selling point. well, and the fact that back in the day you can't buy IDE CDR drives.
Re:heh; common misconseption (Score:3, Interesting)
Shouldn't SCSI drives be faster to test? Like, the testing commands can be integrated into the drives - most SCSI firmware support several commands.. Secondly it's easier to connect 15 SCSI drives than 15 IDE drives. IDE drives have to be tested for master and slave options as well. I guess WD just has the average Joe in mind, with this marketing spin.
God is an Anonymous Coward...jkrise
Re:heh; common misconseption (Score:5, Insightful)
I would *suspect* that scsi chipsets have more things to be tested than ATA ones, since as you may notice, they are supposed to work with 15 devices OR by themselves, possibly providing onboard termination or not.
testing often starts at the wafer stage (where each chip is probed and marked, failed ones are crushed, oftenly), and again when chips are packaged - usually speed sorted / repaird (if possible - a lot of memory devices support repair) at this time. After that, integration testing is actually EASIER because this is when you have a whole set of firmware commands to work with, etc.
Frequently chips have dedicated testing commands, though (that you don't get to know), so things are not completely dire. most flash memory have test modes, for example, where if you put in a code sequence it will write the entire array into, say, a checker board pattern. This is to avoid massive delays of half microsecond writing each location, sequentially. Logic chips (like, say, scsi chipsets) usually have a different challenge - they have embedded subsections, often cache, that you don't have access to directly.
now, to get "into the chip" you will have to sequentially put in the test patterns / vectors into special registers that reside on the lines that run between each embedded component. one register at a time (usually sequentially through a few (dozen or less) pins. testing is expensive, but pins more so
this gets back to the scsi being harder to test - probably the control chipsets are more complex. I can't imagine the mechanical sections being any different (besides the 15krpm ones, anyhow) - generally when something have to communicate with a bunch of other things (like scsi) versus just a few (ATA), the former is more pain in the butt testing wise.
oh, btw - more PIN is also another factor to costs. testers have a limited number of pins, so if you have more pins to test, you test less per turn. can't speak authoratatively on the pincount of drive controller chipsets... just FYI here.
side note: one thing you realize after being in testing is that semiconductor manufacturs often (or, sometimes - depending on the manufacture) puts a LOT of margin into their chips. when they say the chip is rated 75 degrees C, they really mean 75 degrees because the chip was TESTED at that temperature.
ok. long rant... gotta stop now.
Re:Your looooooong reply.. (Score:5, Informative)
chips and tech becomes mature and their FAILURE RATE decreases. mature technology does not cost less to test. On the whole SCSI is still a more complex technology, and I would not be surprised if tested with higher margin / more thoroughly due to the "enterprise level reliability" thing.
besides, as devices gets more complex and more "mature," generally the testing costs increase because you have all these new features, plus the old features, plus the shit that keeps it backwards compatible, to test. you can do better on the profit margin / cost side by making ships that have a lower failure rate, but that does not mean chips gets tested less, or it takes shorter to test them. On the contrary, it usually goes the other way.
Anyhow, example: RAMBUS was expensive because it was a "cutting edge" manufacturing process. the output impedence of the chips had to be controled very precisely, which is difficult to do and a lot of it failed at test - driving up the cost. as process matured, less failed and price came down. but each chip still went through the same routine, and sat the same amount of time on the testers* and took the same number of pin-capacities**, so the TESTING COST stays the same***.
* as memory size increase, they sit longer, usually
** similarly, wider buses takes more pins
*** so in the end testing cost usually increases.
separate the two concepts.
Re:Your looooooong reply.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't even want to get me started on car tires.
The problem with "mature" technology from a QA standpoint, is that your customer begins to expect the product to be perfect everytime. Remember Micropolis SCSI drives? Everyone remembers them because they were so crappy, but the equally crappy BigFoot drives have mostly been forgotten because no one expected much from an IDE drive at the time.
You mean they actually test stuff? (Score:2)
Given the low quality and low reliability of so many devices, I didn't think they were testing anything!
I say this mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I have bought products that simple would not work. It wasn't a case of the devices being defective (ie, faulty single unit), but devices that just don't work *at all*.
I just returned a Hauppage WinTV PvR-350. For $200, it promised hardware MPEG2 encode and decode and the usual suite of video in/outs. The first system I tried it on it didn't work at all. Tech support sent me a suite of 'beta' drivers and some convoluted instructions wildly different than the documentation. The card started actually working (ie, video input was displayed and captured), but system performance (on a ~900Mhz PIII system) was so abysmal even when not writing streams to disk that the computer was unusable. I moved it to another system and it didn't work *at all* with any driver suite or graphics card I could find.
This isn't the first time I've run into products like this that aren't just somewhat disappointing but actually totally fail to function. If you run into this often enough, you start to ask yourself if these designs were ever tested at all.
Don't buy the Hauppage card. Ick -- even if it had worked, you couldn't capture from a third party application and the Hauppage application was pretty ugly (bad GUI, etc) and it was a pretty big hodgepodge of software from different vendors. Worst, I don't think the card does hardware MPEG2 decode to screen, I think its software decode, based on the low system performance.
Warp 10, scotty!! (Score:5, Funny)
Kirk: Scotty, give me 10,000 rpm on those ATA drives!
Scotty: Captain, she can't take it!
Kirk: Damn it, Scotty, you.... promised me.... SCSI speeds!
Anywho, forget about Enterprise Class ATA Drives, when do I get a tricorder, or at least voice recognition built into my five-button wireless optical mouse?
Nice, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this had the same capacity as the "desktop" IDE drives, say 120+ GB then we would be talking. We don't use any drives SCSI or otherwise below 60 GB for our servers.
Re:Nice, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice, but... (Score:2)
That's only cost of entry (Score:2)
Now, if you're striping for performance purposes, you'll get better latency by using a single controller for each drive, however, as we don't know what the application is, we can't make gross generalizations about the cost of a project.
Testing has solved the problems? Yeah, ok. (Score:4, Informative)
The five year warranty is a welcome inclusion. Western Digital is good about replacements.
I have a hard time believing though all my clicking-clacking(WD), and bad block (Maxtor) drives have to due with lack of testing. Testing doesn't help make the drives more reliable. Either SCSI drives have a high test failure rate, or there is more to the story.
10K drives at less than SCSI prices are a welcome addition to the low end market, but I'd only use it where reliability and high performance isn't crucial. IDE drives still don't have their own processor leaving a big advantage to SCSI, right?
-Pete
Re:Testing has solved the problems? Yeah, ok. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Testing has solved the problems? Yeah, ok. (Score:2)
Batch testing (Score:2, Interesting)
Enterprise? (Score:5, Funny)
Gettin' from there to here
It's been a long time
But a fast ATA is finally here
I can download pr0n really fast at last
So much that I'll go blind
Slow ATA's not gonna bottleneck no more
No it's not gonna change my mind
'Cause I've got pr0n, lots of pr0n
I've got so much I dont have to
Ever leave the house
Thanks to faster ATA
I've got such hairy palms
Because of my fast hard drive
I've got pictures
Of all the pr0n stars
I've got (I've got) I've got (I've got) I've got
Pr0n
Lot's of pr0n
Re:Enterprise? (Score:2)
Re:Enterprise? (Score:2)
Coincidence? [cnn.com]
(Sorry for karma-whoring at PT's expense, but if it makes you feel better, the latest news [yahoo.com] is that there may be evidence corroborating Pete's story that he was just doing research.)
why scsi at all? (Score:4, Interesting)
all you want to avoid is getting rid of your information that is stored on the disks. any responsible it-manager will buy raid systems so it doesn't really matter if you pop a broken scsi or ide disc out of the array and replace it.
i don't see any point in buying scsi with expensive discs, expensive controllers and expensive cables.
Two words: Tagged Queueing. (Score:3, Informative)
However, IBM's working on similar concepts [extremetech.com] for ATA.
SCSI is great but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest SCSI drives I've seen are just less than 150Gb but Maxtor makes a 250Gb ATA drive. Is there a technical reason why there isn't size parity?
I've had a preference for SCSI drives for years and I've come to accept that I have to pay a steep premium (and now I know why) but what frustrates me is the density, or lack thereof, with SCSI drives.
Re:SCSI is great but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The article said that to increase spindle speed, they had to decrease platter diameter (=capacity). I guess that goes for SCSI drives as well as these new ATA ones.
Re:SCSI is great but... (Score:3, Informative)
www.pricewatch.com shows 181gb scsi drives. There are also 4 x 181gb drives 1 cube away from me for our EMC.
Maxtor may make a 250 gb drive, but you can't use it in your PC. IIRC, ATA133 can only address up to 120gb.
Also, when you're buying scsi, you're not going for single drive density. You're aiming for throwing 10 drives into a RAID 1+0 config (or similar). And finally, those 250gb are new. They're not going to release it for SCSI until they have some experience with it's failure rates, and what not.
Re:SCSI is great but... (Score:2)
I realize that's still somewhat restrictive, but
Why so difficult? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every manufacturer could, at any time, start producing a diskdrive that has the mechanical and head/servo electronics of an existing SCSI drive integrated with an ATA bus interface. It would have the reliability of the SCSI drive, and assuming that manufacturer has experience in ATA electronics there is no reason to assume that it would have problems on that end.
No need to have it in the market for 5 years to prove reliability. Disk drives are not even in the market for such a long time.
No, they just want to sepatate two different price categories and don't want to blur that gap by offering drives with features from both sides.
Re:Why so difficult? (Score:3, Interesting)
SCSI and ESATA Size Query (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks,
Behlal
Re:SCSI and ESATA Size Query (Score:2)
Re:SCSI and ESATA Size Query (Score:3, Informative)
Per the KB article I found, if you have a FAT32 partition greater than 32gb, XP may experience "data wrapping", which will mangle data. Therefore you should NEVER use FAT32 partitions greater than 32gb with WinXP. (NTFS does *not* have the problem.)
I'm fairly sure I've already seen this happen, with a WinXP partition that was FAT32 and 34gb. At the time I'd thought the HD had failed and RMA'd it, but after finding that KB article, now I'm pretty sure it was "confused filesystem due to this here wrapping bug" not "bad HD".
ATA just doesn't cut it (Score:4, Interesting)
We had some entry-level Sun (netra X1) with IDE drives collapse under medium load, just because of logging. I've had older, slower, SCSI suns perform under much more load without this kind of issue.
ATA is ok for hoarding pr0n, it's OK for the live backup system; but I'm not putting those into any kind of serious server.
And don't you mention ATA RAID. Those who do never used real SCSI Raid (as in "Enterprise" RAID
It's a cost/performance tradeoff all right.
ATA had many uses, but stops short of anything inside a 19" rack.
You have to look at the application (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, for anything that requires file access (HTTP, LDAP, NNTP, SMTP, or even just running multiple apps on a single box), you're going to want to go to SCSI for the benefits of tagged queuing [danbbs.dk] (yeah, I just posted this link on a seperate thread, so the link's redundant, but the message it's supporting is different)
As you said, ATA is fine for desktops, as for the most part, the person's oly doing one thing at a time, however, if there's major disk I/O (video/audio editing), you start getting to 'workstation' class, and could get a performance increase out of SCSI or FC-AL.
As with any engineering or tuning process, you need to know what the characteristics of the system are before you can make a decision. If the process is bottlenecked by CPU, memory, or network I/O, the disks may not have an impact -- however, upgrading one of the other items may suddenly create a need for a better storage architecture.
Re:ATA just doesn't cut it (Score:3, Interesting)
Testing costs??? (Score:2)
So how can testing of ATA drives be cheaper than SCSI? And how can SCSI drives be that magnitude more expensive than ATA on the strength of that alone?
This is a Serial ATA drive (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a somewhat less misleading article [theinquirer.org].
Re:This is a Serial ATA drive (Score:3, Informative)
this is correct: the raptor is wd's serial ata drive. maxtor has sata drives out now too, at 60gb and 80gb sizes. more and larger to come soon.
and man, sata drives are wicked fast. as fast at ata100 7200rpm drives, RAIDed! check out http://www.envynews.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=48
Re:This is a Serial ATA drive (Score:5, Funny)
They could market it as "SATA NIC"!
(And you thought only SCSI chains required the sacrifice of chickens)
On another Note: Maxtor Relaesed their 10k SATA (Score:4, Informative)
ATA cheaper than SCSI? (Score:4, Interesting)
SCSI drives tested individually? Of course, they are meant for enterprise use, blah, blah! But if that is the case, why aren't enterprise ATA drives not tested individually too, eh?
I am sure the extra testing made on SCSI drives puts the price up, but is that necessary? Why not just mass-produce them like ATA?
Mass produce SCSI, and it will kick ATA's butt all around the room. Hard drives manufacturers just want to hold on to their enterprise cash cow by keeping production down to low levels, and keeping margins high.
MaximumPC did a IDE vs. SCSI (Score:5, Informative)
The Winner? The SCSI drive by a margin of more than 30%. There is still a huge difference, especially in the random seek and file transfer areas.
And it was ATA not SATA... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And it was ATA not SATA... (Score:2)
Re:MaximumPC did a IDE vs. SCSI (Score:2)
Re:MaximumPC did a IDE vs. SCSI (Score:2)
Of course, a 73GB Cheetah X15 runs about $650 or so.
The 80 GB IBM runs about $90.
Hell, if we want disproportionate comparisons, throw in the Quantum Rushmore solid state drives. They have access times that are 1/100 that of the Cheetah drives, and I/O throughputs in the 6000 range (Cheetah 15K.3 gets under 600). Of course they cost $28,000 for 3.6 GB, but who cares about cost, right?
Enterprise-class?? (Score:5, Funny)
Enterprise-class??
Great, I'll bear it in mind if I ever build a starship.
How drives could be faster & more reliable . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Memory is 10x more reliable and more shock resistant. It is also nanoseconds rather than milliseconds and doesn't take NEARLY the power or the "pixie dust" to produce.
A company called ADTRON [adtron.com] makes SCSI 2.5" Flash drives. I bought one used on eBay (1 gig) about three weeks ago. I put it in a PowerBook Duo (1995 laptop). The Duo now lasts as long as a modern iBook and the difference is between night and day in App launch, speed, and most unforseen, graphics display. It appeared as if I had almost doubled processor speed.
If you want to see if I'm telling the truth. Look for SCSI Flash or IDE Flash 2.5" drives on eBay and try it in your laptop for a day. There are regularly 350 meg IDE laptop drives for sale. Right now the capacities are capped at 4 gig (and the price on one is $4600) But if WD, Seagate, Maxtor and all the other platter people would just get with the program I'm sure we could have MUCH smaller drives than current systems, with much denser capacities than even today.
I don't see why laptop manufacturers don't push this very hard. Battery life is almost doubled (no moving parts) and it almost eliminates the bottleneck that laptop hard drives have. As for desktops, you could have 4 of these drives in the space of one and possibly have them raided!
Re:How drives could be faster & more reliable (Score:2)
Write wear and write speed (Score:3, Informative)
But if none of that bothers you, there are adapters you can get that let you put a PCMCIA or CF flash card into an ordinary IDE slot.
Re:Write wear and write speed (Score:2)
As for cost, that's also the point. If drive makers would get with the program Flash Drives would come down due to mass production/exceptance.
Big Deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Difference between ATA and SCSI ... (Score:2, Interesting)
One really huge difference lies also in electronics. Usually it's called SCSI Control Blocks (short: SCB's). They are actually commands, sent from SCSI controller to devices telling them what to do (read or write data, etc.)
Any decent SCSI drive will support at least 32 of them and it will execute them out of order, mostly optimizing head-movements. Which gives huge performance boost under truely multi-tasking system.
Re:Difference between ATA and SCSI ... (Score:2)
Batch vs. individual testing (Score:2)
OK, so somebody explain why ATA disks can be tested in batches and SCSI cannot. This still sounds like smoke and mirrors to justify raping SCSI users.
Fry's (Score:2)
Fry's this, Fry's that... Maybe someday I will have the privilege to go to Fry's... =P
Just what sort of MTBF? (Score:2)
Can ATA deliver that?
Western Digital Support Outsourced, Staff Laid Off (Score:5, Informative)
Someone please get a clue ... (Score:3, Insightful)
"ATA disks are cheaper to manufacture than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives for several reasons. The main reason is that ATA disks are tested in batches, whereas SCSI and Fibre Channel drives are tested individually. "
What a pile of horse crap. ATA drives are cheaper because:
- ELECTRONICS.The electronics are a LOT cheaper. The amount of custom logic to support the performance requirements and features of SCSI make the ASICs much more expensive. ($20-$30+)
- SUPPORT. The main reason SCSI/FCAL drives are so expensive is the hand-holding that the big OEMs require when integrating drives into their boxes. "I had a hard error. Fly someone out here tomorrow". Yes, if you buy a drive at Fry's, you don't get this level of support. SCSI manufacturers could care less about drives bought individually through distribution. That is the dumping ground for drives they couldn't sell to an OEM. Many of the big OEMs ship ten of thousands of drives a month. That is who these drives are being made for. There are entire teams devoted to each big OEM customer.
- CUSTOM FEATURES. This goes hand-in-hand with support. Each of the big OEMs requires custom code and electronics features. There are multiple developers per customer to make this happen.
- QUALITY. In order to keep desktop drives cheap, the manufacturing yields must be very high (90%+). This isn't done through creating superior components. It is done by shipping any component that isn't dead into the field. Crappy parts shipped = high failure rates. Don't believe MTBF numbers, they are a crock.
Now, that said, there is a move towards using desktop drives in low-end server apps. The main reason is obviously cost. Many OEMs would like to drive this into the middle and high-end ranges as well. The OEMs are under the misconception that they can get a desktop drive and that it will be supported like the server drives, have equivalent performance and reliability. Given the extremely low margins on desktop drives, this isn't going to happen. Is there any reason that desktop drives can't be made more reliable and feature rich? Of course not. But it is going to cost youAnd yes, I have a clue. I work in server-class HDD development.
Cost analysis (Score:2)
In comparison, I can find a Western Digital WD400JB (40gb) drive for $81. If I get two of these in raid, that'll be $162 for a rig that will outperform it.
Even more compelling, I can get a 120gb WD1200JB drive for $140. Tagged together, that's two drives for $280.
For $80 more, I can get a rig that outperforms the single drive and holds three times as much.
10,000 RPM is not ready for mainstream use. When the size and price competes with 7200 RPM, I'll jump on the bandwagon, but for now I'm happy with my RAID setup.
Slightly off topic, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quality of WD? (Score:2)
The point is ... (Score:2)
It's interesting that people never consider their hardware or useage as a factor in failure.
I imagine things can happen in strange ways (as this is true for everything else) that there are some programs that may corrupt hard drives and HELP create bad blocks. People may use the drives full speed, full throttle for too long, and possibly getting surges in their IDE cables or power cables!
Re:More than meets the eye... (Score:2, Informative)