To SATA or not to SATA

[JimHilton]

Hey all, I recall a while back I tried using a IDE HD as the sys and vol1 (where the files were stored). The CPU load was usually very high with only a couple of machines hooked up. So I went the SCSI route.

But now the SATA'a are more common and I think SATA2? is out now as well.

I'm at a cross road. I really like Netware does exactly as it should file serve very reliably. But the prices of SCSI's are just not worth it.

I guess the question is, will Netware now have decent speed and low system utilization with a SATA HD.

TIA

Jim

 

[goombawaho]

I don't think that it was EVER a UTILIZATION problem. It might have been disk throughput that would have been better with SCSI vs. IDE, but not utilization. Maybe explain what you experienced with IDE drives.

Everybody is using Serial Attached SCSI drives now for servers - it's the norm.

I think you're a little behind the curve, so time to jump into the water.

 

[marvhuffaker]

I don't think I've ever seen a hard drive cause high utilization. It's usually something else.. SATA works fine though I never recommend it for production environment unless it's in a RAID 5 configuration. I see lots of server failures that cost $$$ to repair/recover from because people were too cheap to invest in protecting their data.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[goombawaho]

Waiting for the OP to tell us what he meant by high utilization - memory, CPU, disk IO?????

 

[JimHilton]

From the console monitor screen the Utilization:

The test I did used to computers connected to the server.

One test was moving a couple hundred megs of JPG files (these are realtor photos of houses and an ISO file about 500 megs at the same time.

Utilization bounced from 30 - 90% in both tests.

Jim

 

[marvhuffaker]

Does the utilization go down to normal (1%-3%) after the file transfer is complete?

Are you READING files FROM the server or are you WRITING files TO the server?

I would not expect READs to cause high utilization.. If WRITES to the server are slow and causing utilization, it's because you have a poor performing disc channel (slow) and the drive cannot keep up with your write requests.

Either way, slow READs and sometimes slow WRITES can be improved by increasing RAM. How much RAM does your server have?

As a rule of Thumb, SATA's architecture is much slower than SCSI or SAS.. And it's way slower than a RAID of SAS/SCSI that has a huge amount of cache to improve performance. Going back to my mention of SATA RAID, even a SATA RAID controller should have RAM onboard to cache and help improve disk reads/writes. It's single drive configurations that give you the worst performance and also give you higher risk in the event of drive failure.




Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[JimHilton]

Hi, yes writes and yes, the utilization goes down after the transfer. The sever has 2 gigs of RAM. In this test it was with 1 drive using the mainboards sata controller.

Your summary is what i suspected. That's why i switch to a scsi.

Your idea of a raid controller sounds interesting. Do you know of a model that is Netware friendly and has hoards of RAM on it?

Thanks!

Jim

 

[goombawaho]

2 GB of RAM is like a desktop computer. You've got to step up your hardware specs quite a bit to be running a server class machine.