Santilli said:
Splash/Gary: Could you give me a bit more info on this? I didn't see any major improvement in the drive quality, but the interface sounds like it's much better then prior ide interfaces.
SATA is a far better interface technically and practically than the parallel ATA/100 or ATA/133. Data skew is probably the worst of the various problems that affects parallel ATA. SATA does not have this problem. SATA’s greater channel bandwidth allows for ECC of all data and commands going over the SATA channel without throughput penalty. Needless to say, the SATA cabling is a major improvement over what is available for parallel ATA. SATA drives have also proven to work quite well in RAID configurations, if that’s of interest to you. You should have no problem -- even with a Promise SATA RAID controller – of configuring a reliable good performing SATA array!
I can't say that overall drive quality has increased greatly just in the last year, however,
Fluid Dynamic Bearings have certainly helped reduce high frequency mechanical vibrations significantly -- which is quite important for 24x7 operations. Native SATA will reduce chip count on the drive controller PCB. Electronics engineers are going to use the latest most economically feasible technologies to design and manufacture a *native* SATA drive controller PCBs, meaning very small integrated circuits designs based on at least 0.18 micron fabrication running at 3.3 volts.
So, with FDBs and low chip counts on the drive controller PCBs, hard drives will be theoretically more reliable. One thing about fluid dynamic bearings, though, is that you really should use active cooling to reduce the 10°C ~ 15°C increase in heat generated by the slightly stronger motor that's required to push the drive spindle on those stiff-but-silky-smooth fluid dynamic bearings.
Now the snotty part of me comes out( :wink: ) You expect one 15k cheetah SAS to go 110 mb/sec with 16-32mb of cache?
Unless Quaxtor or Fruit-jitsu have something meaner at that juncture, there will be no doubt that when compared to the Ultra-320 version of the X-15 that a SAS X-15 will be a deadlier performer -- sort of the A-10 Warthog of hard drives, except far quieter, of course, than a deafeningly screechy A-10 Warthog.
The main thing to remember about SAS versus existing (parallel) SCSI is that they will have similar pure read and pure write rates in benchmarks that measure those parameters, but when it comes to mixed tests like the Office Benchmark or High-End Benchmark, where you have a heavy mix of reads, writes, and seeks, you'll see the SAS (and Fibre-Channel) versions of a drive do measurably better because of its full-duplex interface that allows simultaneous transmission of read and write commands and data.
"My prediction for you Santilli in 2004/5 is that you'll have a SAS host bus adaptor, a 15kRPM SAS drive(s), and likely 1 or 2 inexpensive "high capacity" SATA drives. As for me, I'll be plugging my SAS host bus adaptor into a mobo with PCI Express slots."
Gary, you have used prior, IIRC mobos with intergral scsi chips, and, slots that allow raiding 2 cheetahs for a workstation with about 75 mb/sec,
Supermirco, I believe.
No, most of those mobos in workstations (at work) that you refer to actually use a pair of IBM 36LZX hard drives. Those were the bestest and fastest and -- presumably then -- the goodest hard drives moneys could buy. Since then, I can tell you that the (now aging) IBM 36LZX works decent as a server hard drive in RAID-1, RAID-5, RAID-10 installations, but has turned out to be a rather spotty hard drive for workstation use as far as reliability goes.
Yes, the Atto benchmark showed a RAID-0 array of 2-each 36LZX drives (as setup by me with a 16KB block size) on one of these Supermicro P6DGU mobos attaining 72~75 MB read rate before the middle of the test and holding that rate to the end of the Atto benchmark. The Supermicro P6DGU has an integrated (onboard) single channel Adaptec Ultra2 SCSI channel. The ARO-1130U2 RAID controller is added in a PCI slot that has an extension slot, physically much like a 64-bit PCI slot, which is part of the onboard SCSI channel. The ARO-1130U2 only provides RAID XOR calculations, meaning RAID-0 or RAID-1.
After a combination of IBM 36LZX drive failures and need for more high-performance storage space, almost half of these 35+ workstations that used 2-each 36LZX drives with the ARO-1130U2 had either (
over 3 years time):
1.) The 2 drives replaced with 2-each 72 GB Seagate Cheetah 10kRPM drives in RAID-0 array.
2.) 1-each 145 GB Seagate Cheetah 10kRPM drive with no RAID.
Some of the 36LZX drives were simply replaced due to "harvesting" of 36 LZX drives for use elsewhere -- mainly existing RAID-5 or RAID-10 arrays on older servers that had a few drive failures over time, where their spares had been used up.
By the way, these "older" Supermicro P6DGU workstations are still very much in use. When they were procured, the plan was to use them for about 5 years. In mid-2004, they will be replaced with similarly configured systems, except I'm dead sure they will have SAS drives (probably 145 GB 10kRPM SAS for most, a few with 73 GB 15kRPM SAS), 800 MHz FSB, > 3.2 GHz processors, PCI Express I/O expansion bus.
PCI Express will debut next year. Along with Serial ATA Serial SCSI, PCI is going Serial as well: PCI Express. Also of note is that AGP will be history with the debut of PCI Express, as it is more than fast enough and capable enough of doing away with the need of having a dedicated channel for graphics. PCI Express is capable, scalable, AND very fast!
What's your standard setup for 'work' now?
It hasn't changed very much. I may soon build another large scale server based on a Supermicro X5DP8-G2.
http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/E7501/X5DP8.htm
Given this is an office setup, that you want to run for at least 5 years, what components would you use?
OK, back to the normal world! What would I use for a (added descriptors) high-end technical-user office computer that I wanted to keep for 5 years?
Well, given that the i440BX and i440GX chipsets, though sort of “old” nowadays, have proven over time to be very stable, I would want to go with something that seems nowadays to be equally as stable as the venerable i440BX/GX chipsets have proven to be.
It seems that the i845G/GE is quite good and likely the E7205 chipset will prove to be quite good as well. I would NOT use the onboard graphics that these chipsets provide, though. Instead, I would use a mobo that uses one of these chipsets that
also has an AGP slot. In that AGP slot, I would install a Matrox G-550 or inexpensive G-450. Now, if you wanted to install a gamer’s graphics adaptor, you’ll have to choose a favourite of your own, only because I see no use in extensive 3-D gaming power on an “office computer” for the sake of scrolling and zooming speed or the image clarity that the Matrox G-450 or G-550 provides. An optical mouse would be a no-brainer, and I would highly recommend a keyboard with dedicated E-mail and WWW launch buttons, as well as other dedicated application buttons (word processor, etc.) and even web browser navigation buttons if they will be surfing the web extensively.
Hard drive? Oh ya (heh…). Well, I certainly like the Barracuda ATA IV and V drives for a number of reasons, mainly because they are virtually silent but yet provide a good level of read/write performance. I recently built a server (at work) that uses IBM / Hitachi 180 GXP ATA drives. These seem (so far) to be just fine and could very well turn out to be a strong second choice, especially if one REALLY needed the capacity (120 GB and 180 GB).
If you really want to know why I am using 180 GXP drives in a server: I somewhat recently had to build a server overnight (literally, overnight) that also had to have a LOT of storage capacity. It also had to be “as inexpensive as possible,” as I was told. So, I just happened to have a spare 3Ware 8-port RAID controller (Model 3W-6800) in stock. Being that I’ve known from personal experience for years as well as the experiences from a host of others that IBM ATA drives work much better in RAID installations than other brands of ATA drives, I went out and bought 7-each 180 GB IBM 180GXP hard drives and Antec ATA drive bays (1 spare) and built an 6-drive-member RAID-5 array. Even though this is somewhat-old RAID controller (circa 2000), I flashed it with the latest 3Ware BIOS and firmware and it now has the ability to use 48-bit LBA with ATA drives larger than 137 GB. Yes, 3Ware is good! It’s been running flawlessly for over 2 months now, providing almost 1 TB of decent performing storage to a workgroup.
