SAta in a server

Hey majorgeekers

My place of employement is currently buying a new server. So far, the best quote we had by far, was from an education supplier (we are a school). The question tho is about SAta...
The proposed system has a Dual 120GB SAta based Raid-0 configuration. Now, obviously SAta is the replacement for IDE drives... but how do they perform in a server? I remember that IDE drives were particularly bad in one, as their design wasn't to be ran 24/7 and as such tended to blow quickly. Also, performance compared to SCSI was lousy.

Any advice?

A.

 

SATA is a cheap alternative to SCSI disks and the ones offered for larger SANs.

They are cheap because there is nothing very specialist about the disk - SCSI disks are designed for 24/7 access and high throughputs - for instance they are capable of queueing commands to reduce the amount of needless seek times that could occurr from an application randomly accessing data. SATA disks are now finding a place in larger SANs where people are prepared to buy more of the cheaper disks and just be prepared to replace them - albeit more regularly than a SCSI drive. A decent RAID configuration will prevent data loss when a single disk dies.
SATA performance is unlikely to be comparable to SCSI which will outperform in that kind of configuration.SATA is also not as robust as SCSI.
The question as to whether or not SATA is appropriate for a server comes down to (in my oppinion) a couple of factors. What sor tof performance do you need from your server? Does it need to be 24/7, and from what you described above, could you cope with data loss? The above configuration has zero redundancy.
With a RAID-0 striped across a few SATA drives sooner or later a disk will die (that is inevitable - and it will be sooner if they are driven hard constantly) and with RAID 0 you will lose everything on that array.
So my advice to you would be to weigh up how much you will drive the disks, what sort of availability you need, what sort of down time you can cope with, combined with a RAID-0 set up where losing a single disk will cost you all the data on the stripes.

RAID-1 is going to halve your storage capacity on the server but at least when a disk goes you can replace it cheaply without downtime or loss of access/data. With something like SATA I would personally want that.

My 2 cents..

cheers,
Greg

 

Quick follow up question. Is a 8x Dual-layer DVD+/-RW a reasonable solution as backup on a server, or do we really need to get a tape drive?

A.

 

This is really no consideration. If you are a school. you should NOT use SATA IDE drives. I gather there are many students and as a file server it should be very reliable. I would go with nothing less than a RAID 5 SCSI setup with 128MB on the array controller. But not less than 64MB.