to scsi or not to scsi

Bill Moran wmoran at potentialtech.com
Thu Jun 26 18:20:54 UTC 2008


In response to prad <prad at towardsfreedom.com>:

> i've heard scsi hard drives are really good.
> i've also seen at least one site which claims that ide easily
> outperform scsi.
> 
> for the server we  got (dual P3 1GHz 2M which will use raid), is one
> preferable over the other? and what about sata?

There was a time when SCSI drives were unarguably higher quality than
IDE drives.

It's unclear whether or not that's true anymore.  It seems as if even
the lower quality drives have enough lifespan that they live longer
than anyone cares to keep them.  Also, SATA seems to be positioning
itself as high quality too.

Anyone who really cares about their data makes good backups and has
RAID for redundancy.  Whether or not they go with SCSI or SATA seems
to be a matter of personal preference any more.

If you're worried about performance, you have to look at each drive
individually.  Look at seek times and throughput and so forth.  keep
in mind that the published speeds are usually the _interface_ speed,
and there's no guarantee that the drive itself can actually read/write
data at that speed.

You also have to consider the interface.  If you need a high-performance
RAID controller with battery-backed cache, it might only be available
for SCSI.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com


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