We use 4 Drive - Raid 5 18 0r 36gig SCSI HDD's in our servers and of course when it is time to add another server the cost is... well too high once you add the regi ram and all the other goodies..

I have been watching a little on the serial ata's but have not found where anyone is using them in production servers..

Anyone here actually tried it? What do you think? what configuration are you using? Hot Swapable? speed?

Any input would be great.. Trying to decide what to do on the next server going on line.. I will not bother with IDE but I sure like the price better than scsi.

Thank you for your time.

IDE raid is great, get a 3ware card buy a few of their hot swap cases and get a 8 pack of 100gb western digitals, will only cost you what, maybe $1000? 3 or 4 scsi drives will cost twice that.

All depends on price / performance. if you throw a promise IDE raid card into a box and expect server performance then thats understandably not a good idea.

3ware makes beautiful IDE raid controllers (some with 8 channels, thats 16 drives people!)

-Drew

Regarding your question on serial ata. They are not hot swappable. On my desktop I am running a 2 WD Raptor 10,000 rpm drives on a NForce 2 Serial ATA controller in a Raid 0 array and I don't really see any speed difference over a quality 7200 rpm drive without raid.

Actually 8 channels = 8 drives when it comes to IDE as only one drive can transmit at a time on an IDE channel - so putting two drives halves the possible performance of each drive - Hence any decent IDE RAID card will only let you put 1 drive per channel.

We have two areas we use SATA drives:

1. In an External Raid Array
2. In servers attached to motherboards

When useing them in the Array, all the drives are hot swapable and it interconnect to the server is U160 SCSI.

We are using this particular one:

http://www.jetstor.com/02_01_jetstor_iii_sata.html

It works really well and it was cheap storage for the 2.5 TB we have loaded into it. All in all it came out to less than $8k for 2.5TB unraided space. We chop it up depending on what we need it for.

Inside the servers, they are not hot swap.

In my experience copying large files from drive to drive, I have seen performance as good if not better than U160 SCSI. I really think that the future will be SATA and not SCSI just based on the economy and CIO/CTOs not wanting to spend money.

just my 2 cents.

jason