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Thread: SATA HDDs

  1. #1
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    SATA HDDs

    How fast are SATA hard drives. I've been told that they are faster than normal IDE drives yet they appear to be 7200rpm still. Someone mentioned the seek speed was faster but I'm still dubious. Would definitely like to get some new drives that are faster than IDE. I hear the SATA raptors are comparable to SCSI but so is the price.

    Any feedback?
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  2. #2
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    SATA drives are indeed faster then regular ide, scsi is still more value but sata holds their weight in speed.
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  3. #3
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    Yeah, SATA is a faster bus speed. Which can be useful with some quick bursts of data, particularly if the drive uses a larger cache. However, even a normal eide drives can't really fill their bus beyond that first burst of data, and as such there are eide drive out there that are indeed faster than some SATA versions, and vice versa.

    SATA is easier to work with though. I'd imagine the cooling is easier with them rather than the ole parallel connectors, specially in smaller (1u) server cases.

    But if you're looking for all out performance, a nice high rpm scsi is still king, as thelinuxguy mentions.

    <edit>
    Here's a good performance review of the raptors that you mentioned:
    http://storagereview.com/articles/20...WD360GD_1.html
    </edit>
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  4. #4
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    Yah, but the raptors cost as much as SCSI. The main reason that I wanted faster drives is because of th edisk-to-disk backup. With 40gb data, on some servers it takes 6 hours and load is pushing eight. Needless to say that we've had to restrict backups on those servers to once or twice a week. The backups on our dual xeons with 10k SCSIs takes about 90 minutes and the load barely squeals......

    Is an 8mb cache considered large on a SATA?
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  5. #5
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    It's considered fairly average now, I think. 8mb was the big deal when WD came out with their 'premium' edition of their drives, but you'll see them a lot more nowadays anyway, with samsung and others offering it.

    If you truly want a scalable solution, it's gotta be a scsi raid array. You're doing this through NAS I take it?
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  6. #6
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    NAC through Pwebtech. Have a rack of Tualatins that need beefing up.
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  7. #7
    SATA is replacing the ide, but not anywhere near SCSI

  8. #8
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    Hi Laurence,
    The speed of the SATA's on our servers is really good, slightly faster than IDE counterparts. The good thing about the SATA's as well are as thedavid said, the cooling. In traditional 1u servers, the IDE cables can get bunched up and collect heat, whereas the SATA is a small cable. UDMA133 allows for 133mb/s transfer rate, SATA is 150mb/s transfer rate.

    HTH.

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  9. #9
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    SATA is good but my main prob is RAID Cards ust give minimal support for SATA drives for Redhat 9, this can be a big prob

  10. #10
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    i like the way my SATA drives being recognized as SCSI drives with SATA suppport compiled in the kernel. it *feels* good at least. and the performance is actually pretty good too.

    hdparm 4.2 benchmark. seagate 120gb sata model ATA ST3120026AS. rh 9.0 w/ kernel 2.6.5

    hdparm -Tt /dev/sda1

    /dev/sda1:
    Timing buffer-cache reads: 2712 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1355.53 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads: 100 MB in 1.81 seconds = 55.26 MB/sec

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