[Tig] removable storage disks / SATA

[Ramona Howard]

Hopefully this info will help.

There are several types of drives and many types of connectors for the same 
drive.

SATA is a type of interface, just like SCSI or IDE and can have Crappy drives 
associated with it just like others.

We only use Raid Edition drives, which essentially are enterprise drives that 
are equivalent to the companies SCSI drives that they manufactured for years.  
WD made excellent SCSI drives but really crappy IDE drives.

Many factors go into getting reliability.  Getting your drives from a reliable 
source will insure you get drives with current firmware (or at least it 
should) and this plays a huge role in reliability. Also knowing exactly 
what's packaged in that pretty box will help.  Once you have a model number 
of the drive you can begin to do your research on exactly what you are 
getting and how well it stands up.

"SCUSI and FIBRE drives are going to be better and drives designed for  
occasional use in a personal computer environment (SATA with USB or  FW 
interfaces) are at the bottom of the heap and most likely to fail "

Not entirely true.

SATA has been used for years prior to them emerging in this industry.  The 
connetions and interfaces have improved and the drive size and speeds 
continue to get better but like I said before (I think here) you can still 
get cheap SATA, just like there is cheap film stock and certainly cheap beer. 
At the same time expensive does not always mean it's better :)

SATA was originally designed for the supercomputing industry not the home user 
and continues to be used today.


Here are a couple of articles that may shed some light:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10880_11-6002484.html

http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/AMCC_Supercom_0707.pdf

I would suggest for something going back and forth long term, look at solid 
state drives (the interface is not the issue) as no moving parts in the drive 
will yield better results.

Cheers,
Ramona





-- 
Ramona Howard

SpectSoft, LLC
593 Hi-Tech Parkway Suite B
Oakdale, CA 95361
Phone: 209.847.7812 extension 104
Fax: 209.847.7859
http://www.spectsoft.com

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