SCA: SCSI, IDE, or SATA?

[Santilli]

I'm trying to figure out which to go with. Scsi drives are avaliable all the time, cheap, on EBay, and they are fast, and cheap. They have lower capacity, but better longevity, for storage, even if they have lower capacity.

IDE looks pretty good, since buck for mb they can't be beat.

SATA looks like it's coming on, value wise. My use is going to be mirrored
important data backup.

IDE has no drives, other then Maxtors, with a 5 year warranty.

The stuff I save is mainly scanned documents, and pictures, and they take a lot of space. Suggestions, ideas??

s

 

[Mercutio]

Hard to mess up mirroring. I'd say go plain old IDE. Buy a couple Samsung drives in the 120GB range. Two for $150 or so. That's a pretty good deal and a ton of storage.

Olny 3 year warranty, but the SATA drives don't really have it either (what's the warranty for the Raptor you get back after the first one dies... I think it's 30 days).

The used SCSI drives are almost all system pulls from servers. You can be reasonably sure that they've been ridden hard and put away wet. Plus, 18GB doesn't go far these days.

 

[Pradeep]

In addition to your mirrroring I would recommend something like an 8x DVD burner, for proper backups. Remember a mirror doesn't protect you from user error/system crashes etc. You could use a couple of DVD+RW discs for daily backups of your scanned docs, and then perhaps weekly or whatever put it on DVD+R.

 

[Bozo]

Some of Western Digital SATA drives have 5 year warrenties.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[time]

Arrr, they be Raptors!

 

[Mercutio]

Some of Western Digital SATA drives have 5 year warrenties.

Bozo :mrgrn:

Only until you RMA them. The replacements sure don't.

 

[Santilli]

86 Raptors....
s

 

[Bozo]

I must be missing something. I have 15 Raptors in service for some time now without problems. All in some sort of RAID setup. The one that I did RMA was for a broken serial cable connector; the drive still functioned fine. And the replacement still has a 5 year warenty.

Fill me in.....

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

My understanding of current WD RMA fulfillment is that the replacement drives carry a warranty of 30 days. Since I had A LOT of exposure to WD's RMA department in 2003, I'm certain this is true for PATA drives. If it doesn't apply to their SATA models, it's news to me.

 

[sechs]

I'm surprised that you got 15 drives with no duds. Still several years yet....

 

[Platform]

I'm trying to figure out which to go with. Scsi drives are avaliable all the time, cheap, on EBay, and they are fast, and cheap. They have lower capacity, but better longevity, for storage, even if they have lower capacity.... ...Suggestions, ideas??

Yes.

BIG Suggestion #1: Stay away from used E-Bay SCSI drives. Those are fine for someone who needs a spare for a server RAID rebuild, but nobody else -- unless someone is selling like-new X15.3 drives for $5.

Suggestion #2: This one's a little complex in that if you want to push the idea of "future proofing" or "fully modern" or whatever, you'd avoid parallel ATA and only go with SATA. However, you can -- at this juncture -- get the best $ per gigglebyte ratio going with a P-ATA drive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A cheap big 5400 RPM PATA drive in an external USB2 or FireWire hard drive housing will give you plug'n'play storage for backups. Putting an ATA drive carrier in an external USB2 or FireWire will give you further flexibility by allowing this semi-expensive external USB2 or FireWire hard drive housing to be used with multiple hard drives.

If NOW was late-2004 or 2005, I would *definitely* have a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) host bus adaptor in my computer and a complement of SAS/SATA SCA hard drive bays. One could then plug "cheap" SATA drives in for pure basic mass storage. PATA drive technology would be out-of-step with this workstation architecture.

The previously-mentioned USB2 or FireWire approach wouldn't be as speedy as the SAS/SATA via SCA approach, but it would have one nice ability, though, and that's portability to other people's computers, since they would presumably have USB or FireWire. There's also external SATA (and SAS), but the number of "common" computers with external SATA ports won't be in meaningful numbers for years. External SATA will kick the proverbial fanny of either USB2 or Firewire in the raw throughput department.

 

[Santilli]

Thanks.
On the subject, when I installed the P650, the usb setup that connects to the motherboard didn't work, since the cables, when streched over the matrox card, are too short.

I can put it over one of the PCI-x slots, but I loose the slot. Do you have any usb 1-2 type connectors that work with my Supermicro mobo, X5da8, that can use the motherboard connectors, and have longer cables?

Supermicro said buy it on ebay :salut:
Thanks

gs

 

[Santilli]

Splash:

I looked at Granite Digital's external firewire drives, and the case alone is the cost of an ide/sca, or sata/sca housing from Supermicro, or others.

What would you suggest for an external firewire solution?

I'm beggining to wonder if setting up SATA cards on all my machines might be worth it?

I can find Cardbus cards for SATA that might work better then FW, and, they are about the same cost.

I currently have a Maxtor Diamond Max 9, 160 gig, that's constantly telling me it needs to be checked by XP. I suspect either the chipset, or the cable. One of the advantages of SCA is you use a scsi controller, scsi cable, and termination, I think??
HELP!

gs

 

[Bookmage]

My understanding of current WD RMA fulfillment is that the replacement drives carry a warranty of 30 days. Since I had A LOT of exposure to WD's RMA department in 2003, I'm certain this is true for PATA drives. If it doesn't apply to their SATA models, it's news to me.

Just for the record, I recently had to RMA two WD SE drives. Both had 2+years left on the warranty. The replacements had the warranty reflecting the remaining period. So the replacements have the same warranty as ur original drive. How good the "recertified" drives are is still up for debate. However I was wondering how the RMA process was for other companies, ie Samsung, Hitachi, Maxtor. I have had experience with Seagate and WD only. And Dell.... cuz they had the cheapest drive of the week, and 5 of the 7 drives i bought from Dell died within a year. 1/3 of Seagate and 2/3 of Maxtor and 1/2 of WD. Maybe it's Dell, maybe it was the full moon or I overdrew my good luck account. Whatever the reason, I won't be buying any more drives from Dell.

Since drives are only as good as the warranty standing behind them, which company is good? Both in quality, speed, and ease of process. hrm... maybe this should be a new thread...

 

[Santilli]

I had a clicking Cheetah 15.3 but firmware version 2. I needed a version 3 to match with my raid setup, since the other three drives are firmware version 3. I put that in my note to seagate, they rmaed the drive, and sent me a version three. It works just fine. It's the only Seagate cheetah I've ever had fail inside warranty.

Probably something I did, putting it in the mac with a sucktacular power supply...
s

 

[sechs]

Wow... someone actually had a 15k.3 fail.

I knew that there had to be one out there somewhere!

 

[Santilli]

Sechs: Seagate does put effort into their scsi lines, and a failure is VERY rare, inside warranty.

s

 

[Mercutio]

And yet, to look at their ATA products, you'd never know it!

 

[Santilli]

Merc: I don't know, but the ATA line has never been a real speed burner, so I hoped it was reliable...

And I got the model wrong, it was a 15.2, IIRC.

15.3 is on the shelf, after coming out of this mac, since it wasn't much faster then the two cheetahs in Raid 0, and, the Tempo drivers were causing crashes...

s