Xserve RAID Updates

[Alexander]

I was just using a for instance, and I said 10k becasue they would be cheaper 😉

Or because 15k SATA drives don't exist.

And neither 10k nor 15k drives exist at all in the kind of 200+ GB sizes we're talking about, regardless of interface.

 

[JFreak]

Or because 15k SATA drives don't exist.

And neither 10k nor 15k drives exist at all in the kind of 200+ GB sizes we're talking about, regardless of interface.

yep, it's scsi currently that has the performance crown, but anyway, the experience is that 10k is for some reason a bad speed for a hard drive.

 

[ASP272]

One word. Schweeeeeeeeeet! 😀

 

[~Shard~]

Makes sense to me - storage is cheap, so why not! I'll have to let the guys in our lab know so they can upgrade our existing one. 😎

 

[piers]

Regarding SATA and Xserve RAID performance, I guess it all depends on what you plan to do with the RAID. gekko513 has argued that the throughput bottleneck is not likely to be the ATA layer, which sounds reasonable.

But if you want to use the RAID on a file server or for transaction based systems, throughput is not all that matters. Simultaneous random access by many users may well be a more important issue in such a case.

And in this respect, SATA seems to have large advantages over Ultra ATA, at least if the SATA implementation supports Native Command Queuing (which is a fairly new SATA command protocol addition). Besides, the proponents of NCQ even claim that it reduces the mechanical wear and tear on drives. I believe that SATA with NCQ does have a noticeable performance benefit for multiuser random access based storage systems.

We had been putting a planned Xserve RAID purchase on hold for a couple of months now because we hoped that the next release might actually use SATA. But since it now does not seem to be likely that we will see SATA in Xserve RAID anytime soon, so we will go ahead and purchase the current version.

 

[ClimbingTheLog]

yep, it's scsi currently that has the performance crown, but anyway, the experience is that 10k is for some reason a bad speed for a hard drive.

That's voodoo, man. There's nothing magic about 10k RPM unless you've discovered anti-gravity.

 

[ClimbingTheLog]

Note to self... 🙂

Is there a chance of Apple re-revamping HFS? We went from that to HFS+, and then to Journaled HFS+, but that is still a rather old filesystem. Will it be changed anytime soon to take advantage of the new Xserve capacities?

Tiger has something that's still called HFS but isn't. It's got meta-data built-in and unix commands can work directly with all the files' forks atomically.

 

[sjl]

Tiger has something that's still called HFS but isn't. It's got meta-data built-in and unix commands can work directly with all the files' forks atomically.

Um. No. Tiger has HFS+ still. HFS+ has always had meta data support built in. The change is in the Unix tools: they now are aware of files' forks and meta data, in a way they weren't before.

IOW: this is a userspace change, not a filesystem change.

 

[JFreak]

That's voodoo, man. There's nothing magic about 10k RPM unless you've discovered anti-gravity.

yes there is, as well as there was unpredictable difficulties in 90nm cpu production. nobody knows why. i have seen many 10k raid systems fail, run very hot, and generally having a lot more problems than faster 12k and 15k systems (or the older 7.2k systems).

i cannot be so misfortunate that ALL strange problems just accidentally occur with 10k drives.

 

[Sun Baked]

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 😛

You are still looking at the standard PC marketing crap.

Even Maxtor has their "MaxLine/MidLine" series with the better reliability (mean time to failure (MTTF) of 1 million hours) and 3 year warranty, problem is they're not alway running the fastest RPM and/or data bus -- especially if the RAID housings haven't been offered in a new generation, which doesn't happen as often as desktops.

Though Maxtor does offer a SATA MaxLine, Apple hasn't updated their RAID chassis.

So while the desktops may get the faster RPM and quieter drives, they may not last as long -- since we all remember series of drives from all companies that tended to implode before the 3yr warranty was up, and they all dropped to those 1yr warranties to cut cost.

 

[AidenShaw]

You are still looking at the standard PC marketing crap.

As opposed to standard Apple marketing crap? 😉

"64-bit"
...when the OS is 32-bit

"first 64-bit desktop"
...when 64-bit desktops were shipping 10 years ago, and the OS is still 32-bit

"fastest..."
...on Apple's unspecified tests

Crap come from all over, right?
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"piers" comment about Native Command Queueing describes the only real benefit of SATA to the XServe RAID. Since the unit already has individual channels of PATA, the individual channels in SATA isn't a factor.

Drives with NCQ are pretty rare, though. Perhaps Apple is waiting for NCQ drives to be widely available before doing a SATA version of the system....