edesignuk said:
It's very nice, and it's a good price, but 7200RPM ATA100 drives are
old tech. They should be using SATA 10k drives, or atleast SATA 7200RPM for the cheap skates
When you have fourteen hard drives, each hanging off their own controller,
any interface technology that you're likely to use these days is going to be damn fast. It doesn't matter if it's ATA100, fast SCSI, SATA, or something else; the bottleneck is more than likely going to be the hard drives, not the interface.
Where I work is looking at buying four Xserve RAIDs to hook up to a system for a backup project (basically, storing gobs of data at a third site for redundancy; for our needs, tape is overkill.) As one of the guys involved in speccing this thing out, I'd be quite happy to hang the four drive boxen off a single fibre channel switch, and funnel the switch through a single fibre to the host: we're more likely to be hit by network latency and throughput issues than drive throughput and latency. (Well, ok, two fibres and two switches for redundancy, but whatever.)
The key thing here is that ATA100 is a known quantity. Serial ATA is still very new. When you're talking enterprise grade hardware, you want reliability, and you're prepared to pay for it. Reliability means that you know what the likely issues are, and what the fixes for those issues are. Give it two or three years, and yes, I'd agree that SATA is likely to make it into the Xserve RAID or an equivalent box. Not yet, though.
