Has anyone tried using SATA disks on the D280?

We are thinking about getting one cabinet of SATA disks to our D280 to store big images and other low performance data on.
We will still keep our critical data on FC for best security and best performance.

/johnny

depending on how large you plan to grow the SATA setup or how hard you are pushing the FC controller already, you might consider the B220.  Its pretty cheap.  STK is just releasing the FC/SATA behind the same controller so I would be a little careful with that setup.

I beleive you will need to do a firmware upgrade to support that as well as upgrade SanTricity.

At the moment I am only thinking about adding around 4 TB on SATA disks to our D280.
What I would like to use it for is basicly to stage backups on before they are moved to tape. I/O's will mostly be large block I/O.

I know that we need an upgrade to SanTricity and also that it is a new feature. But if we get the budget for this we won't implement it before next year, and I expect that LSI and StorageTek then will have the setup in good working order.

My "dream" for our D280 for all of next year is 3 cabinets of 146 GB FC disks and 1 cabinet of 250 GB SATA disks, so I wouldn't call it big or havy loaded at all.

/johnny

I currently support a D280 w/ 20 TB of FC and 15 TB of SATA.  The only problem I've incountered is that we've had about a dozen drives go bad.  I've only lost 1 test raid set due to a double disk failure.  It takes about 8-10 hours to rebuild a drive on inital failure and another 6-8hours to fail it back.  

This is quite a bit longer than it takes on the FC drives.  Overall I'm pleased with the price/performance and the only caution I'd give is not to build raid sets that are greater than 6 or 7 drives.

We have had the SATA disks for 6 months now and I haven't had one single problem with them at all.

They seem ok.

Just today I asked our IT management to buy a FLX210 with 2 TB FC and 3,5 TB SATA disks.

/johnny

SATA in general has a higher failure rate. I test these arrays for LSI/Engenio. I have been quite surprised in my test lab at how few of my SATA drives have failed, but I expect it every day. That is just SATA. For your purpose of backup before tape it should work fine.

I agree. SATA will have a higher rate of failure.

Most people tend to forget that even if you compare a SATA disk and a SCSI disk that use the same HBA the SCSI disk will have a lower failure rate, because most people dont understand the difference in the onboard cntl. on the disks.
SCSI has a huge error correction system that isn't on the SATA disks.

I know what StorageTek expect to charge us for our 2 hour servicecontract on the SATA disks. If I remember right the charge more then twice as much per GB on SATA then on FC.

But we will use SATA for backupstaging, low performance, low risk data like test enviroments, software dist. and things like that.