By: Cmackin1

Cmackin1 — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:35:09 +0000

I’ve heard this question so many times. The simple answer for me is that the SATA drive in your desktop is not the same technology as your SAN or server drives, at least those that are dedicated to high availability high-speed access tasks like database read/writes, etc. I’ve always insisted on using RAID arrays of SCSI (or now SAS) drives that are manufactured (and then tested and validated by the SAN provider). When customers have tried to deploy 7,200 RPM SATA drives in Tier 1 situations, we have replaced drives every couple of weeks in some cases. They just aren’t manufactured to work as reliably in enterprise class situations unless lower tiers of storage are dedicated to them for archiving and low level access. The additional testing and validation is worth the extra expense, especially when there’s a cost involved in replacing failed drives in the array. I have replaced dozens of desktop IDE and SATA drives and only a relative few FC or SCSI drives in servers. The MTBF (meantime between failures) of these enterprise class drives is phenomenal in my experience. And when we put them in a 16 drive array enclosure the reliability (much lower risk) goes way up as well.

Comments on: Making the hard drive cost question easier to answer

By: Cmackin1