10k SATA vs 15k SCSI Hard Disks...
 

Read this article:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=19

Interesting... anyone has thoughts?

I think it is moving that way. If you are looking for cutting edge you still go with the SCSI because of the CPU utilization. For anything less you can look at a good SATA system. SATA would certainly be fine for a web front end server.
I wonder how SAS will stack up

I would guess it won't matter much if you are serving tons of dynamic files like php pages as lots of them will be cached. The page was awful blinky for me to read the full article :/

That article is over 14 months old - a lifetime in disk technology so i wonder how they compare now. Our (work) experience is that SATA still lags SCSI - certainly in SAN arrays.

I scanned over the article to the end results so I may have missed something. I did a lot of research before having my new 2x 270 Opteron server custom made with 15k SAS drives, RAID 1 & RAID 10 drive arrays, etc. I had a lot of people telling me to go with the Raptor 10k SATA drives because they were "just as fast" as SCSI but after a lot of research that just isn't true in a heavy data base environment. SCSI or SAS drives have a lot better I/O than SATA.

I would be willing to use fast SATA drives for future web servers but for my database server I won't use anything but SCSI or SAS.

I plan to use 4 x SATA disks in RAID 0 - that should be plenty fast.

Erwin,
Are you using this for data base or web? How many servers are you running now?

David

Its not so much speed, as having the the onboard cpu just for the scsi drives to do lookups. Which is why scsi is, and always has been faster.

No doubt 15,000 RPM SCSI hard drives are faster than 10,000 RPM Serial ATA hard drives. I have both kinds and there is really no comparison... especially when comparing large file transfers.

All I have to say about hard drives is:

RAID RAID RAID RAID

RAID-10 = The way to go for anything (if you can afford it).

If you had to choose between the following for a VERY BUSY DATABASE SERVER, which would you choose?

1. 10k Raptor SATA vs 10k SCSI?

2. 10k Raptor SATA (2) RAID 1 vs 10k SCSI?

3. 10k Raptor SATA (4) RAID 1 vs 10k SCSI?

I'm trying to decide how essential SCSI is for a busy db server.

Also, choose between the following:

4. Dual Processor/ Dual Core Opteron 2.0 4 Gb with 10k Raptor SATA (2) RAID 0 (or RAID 1)

vs

Dual Xeon 2.8 (single cores) 3 Gb with 10k SCSI (no Raid)

for a busy database server???

Is SCSI so much better that it overrides the CPU advantage? Does RAID makes SATA better than SCSI?