[Article] SATA entering the enterprise

Interesting but surprising to me. While the SATA interface by itself should be quite appealing for the server market and other serious storage needs, all the drives that are currently using that standard are optimised for desktop use, not server-like accesses. This fact relegates the SATA drives (at least those currently available) to second role and for low traffic - low I/O applications.

Also surprising is the declaration of once-SR-forum-member John Paulsen, stating that SATA drives' defect rate is lower than traditional ATA drives. It contradicts what I've heard before. Most of the problems of SATA are attribuated to the low maturity level of the interface and of its implementation on many SATA drive models. So to read that SATA drives, despite their relative enfancy, show superior relability rates is, well, intriguing.
 
While the SATA interface by itself should be quite appealing for the server market and other serious storage needs, all the drives that are currently using that standard are optimised for desktop use, not server-like accesses. This fact relegates the SATA drives (at least those currently available) to second role and for low traffic - low I/O applications.
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This isn't necessarily the case. Just look at Google. They were famous for using linux clusters based on IDE drives. And it's not like their search engine was any slower than Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, msn, etc.
 
CougTek said:
Also surprising is the declaration of once-SR-forum-member John Paulsen, stating that SATA drives' defect rate is lower than traditional ATA drives. It contradicts what I've heard before. Most of the problems of SATA are attribuated to the low maturity level of the interface and of its implementation on many SATA drive models. So to read that SATA drives, despite their relative enfancy, show superior relability rates is, well, intriguing.
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I dont see how you get that from the article.... it says that failure rates among S-ATA aren't unusually high and there are no known issues with the S-ATA interface either...
 
CougTek said:
So to read that SATA drives, despite their relative enfancy, show superior relability rates is, well, intriguing.
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"Reported problems among SATA drives appear to be fewer than the rate that's typical for ATA drives"

I suspect this is due to the PC savy of the SATA drive buyer.
Probably only enthusiast types/enterprise types are buying it.

It could also be the nifty new connector... who knows.
 
I assume everyone here knows that a drive being S-ATA does not make it any more reliable than if the drive were P-ATA. Infact, I could only conclude that you are more likely to encounter problems with an S-ATA drive because of the reletive immaturaty of the controllers and drivers.
 
Oddly, there aren't any SATA drives up over the 50th percentile in SR's reliability survey.(1)

(1) That I noticed, anyway.(2)

(2) And I still can't get over those raptor results, either.
 
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