Should I buy SATA? 4

[ngkatsaras]

This seems like a great deal to me!

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantml350/specifications-g4p.html

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/serial/sata/index.html

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantml350/questionsanswers-g4p.html

As the next step in the evolution of ATA hard drives, SATA is directed towards customers requiring the best price advantage for entry level servers and bulk storage deployments in non-mission critical environments.

I wonder why they say "non-mission critial environments"?
Are these drives really so unreliable? Isn't that why I'm mirroring and doing RAID, for the redundancy? Isn't that why I have 3 years of hardware warranty?
HP tries to downplay the performance of these 7.2k SATA drives, saying they have "only" 1.5gbps throughput.
I really wonder, if I buy (2) 80 GB SATA drives, mirroed for the OS, and (3) 160 GB SATA drives with the 6-port SATA controller and do hardware RAID 5, I bet that server will perform quite well. I'm replacing a 3 year old ML350 G1, 1Ghz, with (5) 72 GB U320 10k drives. For the new server, I would get the 3Ghz Xeon. My question is, how does the throughput compare between the proposed new server versus my existing server?

We are currently running SBS 2000 on our existing server, but our SQL database (40gb) and Exchange (15gb) servers have grown so large that things have slowed down tremendously, even though we have 1.5gb of RAM. So what I need to do is buy two new servers so that I can move everything from my existing server out to the new servers. Of course, I need to do this as cost efficiently as possible and I think I'm going to go with the SATA drives unless I get some really bad feedback against SATA... I hope not!

If anybody has SATA Raid, please let me know how well you like it and whether you have had any issues, also I would like to know if you have SATA and it's working fine.

Many thanks in advance!

 

[anawrocki]

I have 2 G2 ML310 Prolaints with SATA drives mirrored. Slowest pieces of crap on the planet. Almost seems artificially slower then the should be. I have tried W2K and W2K3, multipe rebuilds, and updated firmware / drivers. I don't recomemnd them. I will be purchasing only SCSI Proliants from here on out.

 

[terry712]

i wouldnt consider them via in a production environment unless you are a very small factory or something - ie 4 or 5 people or something or for working in the house

i would stick with scsi

 

[ngkatsaras]

That's really sad, there is no reason for SATA drives to perform so poorly. You are probably right, they probably want to give SATA a bad rep so they can continue to sell their overpriced SCSI drives. Thanks for the honest, but disappointing feedback.

 

[ntinlin]

SATA 1 drives do not support a lot of features that SCSI drives have had for years like elevator queueing etc.

Also while the SATA may be doing RAID how much memory is allocated to the cache, it makes a LOT of difference to have a decent RAID card with a decent amount of cache.

 

[Alterac]

SATA-2 on a raid 5 card in a hardware raid setup will perform very well.

Drives with NCQ (Native Command Queueing) are very common now and a good price / gb and decent performance. Not Ultra320 with 15K rpm drives, but decent.

If you purchased the server and then added extra drives and made sure its a dedicated raid 5 controller for the sata (onboard cpu and upgradible memory) I would be pretty confident with the performance / price ratio.

 

[ngkatsaras]

Alterac, thanks for that. But it looks like I'm going to go with the SCSI, not worth taking any risks on something so important.