[Tig] removable storage disks / SATA

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Ramona Howard wrote:
> 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.

But more often than not.  SATA is for cost-reduced, or 2nd tier 
storage.  Otherwise one would choose SAS (serial SCSI) drives, which 
use a similar electrical interface.

> 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.

Somehow I don't believe that the innards of these drives are 
"equivalent".  Otherwise a 300GB 15K RPM SCSI drive would not cost at 
least $1K while a 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drive costs $400.  When I last 
purchased a SATA drive (from Seagate) I decided to pay the extra $15 
premium in order to purchase the model with "enterprise" in its name 
(their top of the line SATA drive).  It is not clear if there was 
actually any physical difference.  Maybe the warranty was better, 
maybe it received extra testing, or maybe it just made me feel better.

> 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.

This is bad advice.  Depending on the type of underying device, solid 
state drives only support an average of 10K to 100K writes (depending 
on underylying technology) before they are expected to fail.  Solid 
state drives wear out!

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/