SATAII vs SCSI?

[mindaugas]

The advantages of each are obvious ... or are they?

SATAII you get big cheap drives with decent performance.

SCSI you get supreme performance along with reliability.

You cand get RAID controllers for both technologies with CPU included, no need to software RAID.

Here is the scenario. You want to build a web server, you have the money for either 3 x 73GB SCSI drives (RAID 5, 15k RPM u320, hardware RAID) or 3 x 350GB SATAII (possibly bigger) drives. This server will obviously have lots of disk IO on small files. No database server will be run, except for flat file db's.

I'm interested to hear what people think.

 

[feigned]

The advantages of each are obvious ... or are they?

SATAII you get big cheap drives with decent performance.

SCSI you get supreme performance along with reliability.

You cand get RAID controllers for both technologies with CPU included, no need to software RAID.

Here is the scenario. You want to build a web server, you have the money for either 3 x 73GB SCSI drives (RAID 5, 15k RPM u320, hardware RAID) or 3 x 350GB SATAII (possibly bigger) drives. This server will obviously have lots of disk IO on small files. No database server will be run, except for flat file db's.

I'm interested to hear what people think.

Small files with intense disk I/O? Chuck on another SCSI disk with a badass controller and RAID 10 that bad boy.

Of course, depending on the connection of the webserver and number of connections, you'd probably be fine with SATA disks instead of SCSI. But if this is any kind of serious webserving, I wouldn't be skimping on random access.

 

[DougLite]

4x 36GB Maxtor Atlas 15K IIs, or if you can still find them new, 4x 36GB Fujitsu MAS, RAID 0+1. End of story. Server access patterns are decidedly different from desktop access, and SCSI delivers the best random access performance possible. No ATA drive comes within smelling distance of the server performance offered by the monsters named above - Proof Scroll down to the Server DriveMarks. The MAS delivers slightly better server performance than 15KII, but is a generation solder, so has not been tested on TB4.

 

[Henrytxin]

SCSI for sure , unless you really need a lot of space and cannot afford it to be on SCSI

But maybe i would still go for the level 5 RAID, if you have to add more discs, performance wil keep up increasing, And the updates have to be done in pairs with RAID 10 (forget 0+1 please)

Saludos

 

[therealkevlar]

SCSI all the way. I would stick to using RAID-5, it gives you a decent amount of redundancy and has great read speeds which would match the role of web serving perfectly. I would add one thing, provided you come across some more money in the future and the RAID controller permits - you could add a 4th SCSI drive as a hot spare for the array and be able to lose two drives in a relatively short amount of time which could save you some trips to wherever the server will be running.

 

[unhappy_mage]

SCSI all the way. I would stick to using RAID-5, it gives you a decent amount of redundancy and has great read speeds which would match the role of web serving perfectly.

If there's *any* database stuff at all, it will slowly expand to become the primary function of the machine, and write speeds *matter* for databases. If you have to expand in the future, the only real feasible path is to backup, destroy, and recreate the array. Online expansion is all fine and good, but it's not real reliable for a real server machine. 10 all the way.

If only 3 disks fit in the case you picked, get 2 scsi in raid 1 and 1 sata for capacity stuff - images, drivers, promo videos, downloads or whatever.