Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : IDE hard drives?

[soul]

I'm curious about something. I've been looking around at different web hosts this past week, and noticed that a lot of them use IDE hard drives. This surprises me, because I expected most people that make a living off the reliability of their servers to be using SCSI drives. The reason being that IDE drives used to have the reputation of being throw-away drives that you use until they die a year or two later, as well as the fact that IDE drives aren't usually as fast at seeking as SCSI drives.

Have IDE drives become that much more reliable, or is it not that big of an issue since the IDE drives offer more storage space at a cheaper price, that it's actually a viable solution? Can someone enlighten me?

Thanks.

[System]

While most IDE drives probobly aren't quite as reliable as SCSI drives they are not as bad as they used to be, when was the last time you had a HD crash? I know I have drives that are 4+ years old that still work fine.

As for speed SCSI is faster, but I don't think it would make a huge difference on most webservers, unless it was overloaded.

[chaud]

I thought IDE and SCSI are somewhat the same, just have different transfer methods...

[jbigelow]

They are both somewhat similiar in that they are both mass storage devices. But they way they manage that storage and interface to a client vary significantly

http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/79/

Do a search in google for IDE vs SCSI and you'll get a whole mess of pages dissecting the diferences.

Justin

[TheServerExperts]

SCSI=Faster
IDE=More data GB

[HQHost]

Also IDE drivers doing well in most situations

[Hostkookster]

You don't need a SCSI drive when you have dual IDE's using RAID 0...better known as Stripping. This along with a motherboard capable of doing Serial ATA....who needs an expensive SCSI drive, especially when IDE's continually go down in price as space increases.

[Bladerunner]

We are slowly moving away from SCSI system for our network at work.
Whereas a couple of years ago I always specified SCSI systems for our Windows/Linux/Exchane/SQL servers I now seriously look ar IDE.

I still have RAID, RAID5 to be exact however I can get an IDE RAID5 configuration with 4x 160GB HD (480GB useable) for a lot less than a SCSI setup.

IDE drives are proving to be just as reliable.
I also have the same hot-swap abilities with the IDE array as I would with a SCSI.
The only difference is that the IDE drives are 7200rpm and my SCSI systems are either 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm.

[Yassi]

Originally posted by activeforce
SCSI=Faster
IDE=More data GB

Also, IDE is cheaper

[Joshua]

Originally posted by soul
I'm curious about something. I've been looking around at different web hosts this past week, and noticed that a lot of them use IDE hard drives. This surprises me, because I expected most people that make a living off the reliability of their servers to be using SCSI drives. The reason being that IDE drives used to have the reputation of being throw-away drives that you use until they die a year or two later, as well as the fact that IDE drives aren't usually as fast at seeking as SCSI drives.

Have IDE drives become that much more reliable, or is it not that big of an issue since the IDE drives offer more storage space at a cheaper price, that it's actually a viable solution? Can someone enlighten me?

Thanks.

Years ago, IDEs were definitely not as reliable as SCSIs, but they've become pretty reliable over the years. I have a 6 year old Dell desktop here in the office, running around 12 or more hours per day, and the original 10GB HD is working fine . SATA drives are eventually going to replace SCSIs, as they're cheaper and can hold more data than SCSIs, but still have a speed advantage over IDEs.

-Josh

[Luke-b]

SCSI is MUCH better and cheaper.

[NetHosted-Andrew]

Originally posted by Aeox
SCSI is MUCH better and cheaper.

Unless you're factoring in having to buy two IDE drives in the same lifetime as one SCSI you're wrong about the cheaper thing.

Andrew

[wheimeng]

Reliability wise, nothing beats SCSI...

[KualoJo]

We now run a lot of servers, and a lot of workstation PCs, and we buy our drives from well known distributors; Maxtor, Seagate etc. I am yet to see an SCSI drive fail, whereas I have seen several IDE drives fail in the past.

I would certainly not set up a single shared server nowadays with an IDE hard drive, not only do we get better performance, but I feel a heck of a lot more confident that years down the line I won't have to be replacing those SCSI drives. Perhaps I'm overly cautious, but I'd much rather be overly cautious now than run the risk of problems in the future.

[dftchris]

If you are going dedicated wouldn't it be relatively easy to just upgrade to an entire new server every year or so? This would also mean replacing the hard drives, usually. I would think you'd need to with the speed technology is growing.