Maxtor NEW 15K II disks, 3.0ms avg seek times...

[Ali 0]

oh man, i knew i should have waited longr to set up my raid!!!

 

Does it come in SATA?

[Jerry Atrik 0]

one of our engineers just got a dual xeon with one of these drives.

 

it kicks butt

[Ali 0]

I wonder if SATA150 has faster data transfer capability, then why the fastest SATA drive is 10K RPM? it just doesn't mak sense to me. there has to be a reason why they have not come up with faster ones yet.

15K is not a problem since they have been out for sometime now, but only for SCSI.

I think SATA makes more sence for home user, but i have seen it being used for servers as well.

Don't you think if you have SATA on your server you may want to have 15K RPM drives on it?

[Ali 0]

EDIT: actually i was wrong, SCSI is still faster than SATA (had to look it up). but still it is no reason for not making 15K SATA drives. It is supposed to be fast enough.

[jmmijo 1]

Originally posted by ali:

Quote:

EDIT: actually i was wrong, SCSI is still faster than SATA (had to look it up). but still it is no reason for not making 15K SATA drives. It is supposed to be fast enough.

 

Manufacturing costs are the main reason for not making a SATA version of this drive.

 

Have you priced the 15K drives, they are much more expensive

[Jerry Atrik 0]

alec u forgot the single biggest advantage of a scsi drive.

bi-directional read write

reading and writing on the same clock cycle.

 

btw the new seagate 15k drives are super quiet

[jmmijo 1]

Remember another reason that Seagate can make these 15K drives quiter and actually run cooler is the spindle motor technology and the design of the casing.

 

You'll note that the spindle motors are designed with fluid filled multi-ball bearings. They are designed within much tighter tolerances and are somewhat larger and better torque to get them platters up to speed.

 

The platters too are manufactured to a higher degree of precision to weed out any of the slightly warped ones which would case inbalances and hence more heat and wear on the spindle motor.

 

Also if you've looked at the 15K drives they are designed with extra cooling fins built-in, better heat disappation.

[Brian Frank 0]

Originally posted by ali:

Quote:

I wonder if SATA150 has faster data transfer capability, then why the fastest SATA drive is 10K RPM? it just doesn't mak sense to me. there has to be a reason why they have not come up with faster ones yet.

15K is not a problem since they have been out for sometime now, but only for SCSI.

I think SATA makes more sence for home user, but i have seen it being used for servers as well.

Don't you think if you have SATA on your server you may want to have 15K RPM drives on it?

 

SCSI can support multiple (7 or 15) drives on one channel. IDE is limited to 2, and SATA to 1. SCSI is a different animal than ATA alltogether, and they are designed differently. ATA's main advantage is cost. Although SATA150 can run up to 150MB/s, that's the burst speed, not sustained, in which case 40MB/s is the steady trasnsfer rate. Basically, this means that ATA66 is fast enough here. The real advantage of SATA is getting past the latest physical limitation of 137GB.

[jmmijo 1]

Originally posted by Brian Frank:

 

SCSI can support multiple (7 or 15) drives on one channel. IDE is limited to 2, and SATA to 1. SCSI is a different animal than ATA alltogether, and they are designed differently. ATA's main advantage is cost. Although SATA150 can run up to 150MB/s, that's the burst speed, not sustained, in which case 40MB/s is the steady trasnsfer rate. Basically, this means that ATA66 is fast enough here. The real advantage of SATA is getting past the latest physical limitation of 137GB.

 

You're also forgetting the storage capacity of ATA/SATA drives when compared to SCSI

 

Also one other critical point to make about SCSI is MTBF rates, SCSI devices are generally designed for 24/7 operation. If you read most/all of the manufactures fine print about ATA/SATA drives you'll note that they make no such warranties anywhere near this for ATA/SATA drives. Although WD with their Raptor line are calling these near-line quality drives, i.e., they should run better and longer then their desktop drives. Also note that their Raptor drives are based on their SCSI drive technology, hence the reason they have standard SCSI capacities

[Jerry Atrik 0]

until we "RAM" new thinking into peoples heads we will still be stuck in a magnetic media world huh alec.

[jmmijo 1]

Hey APK, don't you have one of those nice and expensive solid-state HD's ?!? Seems to me you mentioned this in another thread and it run via a U160 interface IIRC

[jmmijo 1]

Also note that if you get an I2O RAID controller, these require some ram installed on them or they may come with some preinstalled. This ram is used for both the custom IOS and data buffering which does help speed things up a bit.

 

Nice thing about these controllers is that there are prevelent in the SCSI arena however they are starting to show up more in the ATA/SATA RAID controller areana as well. I have a Promise Supertrak SX6000 with a 128MB stick of ram and this does help things out with any of the configs used, RAID 0, 1, 0+1(aka 10), 5 or JBOD.

[jmmijo 1]

Well I've been using the Promise line of controllers since back in the day too, I had an old VLB and a PCI caching controller and both were high performance cards.

 

As for what's available today well take a look at this one, the FastTrak S150 SX4 and this new one, the FastTrak SX4030. Both are very good at what they do and of course and require additional ram to operate properly. This added ram will of course be used for both the XOR engine and the caching/buffering of data.