Merlin,
> I think the danger about SATA is that many SATA components are not
> server quality, so you have to be more careful about what you buy. For
> example, you can't just assume your SATA backplane has hot swap lights
> (got bit by this one myself, heh).
Yeah, that's my big problem with anything IDE. My personal experience of
failure rates for IDE drives, for example, is about 1 out of 10 fails in
service before it's a year old; SCSI has been more like 1 out of 50.
Also, while I've seen benchmarks like Escalade's, my real-world experience has
been that the full bi-directional r/w of SCSI means that it takes 2 SATA
drives to equal one SCSI drive in a heavy r/w application. However, ODSL is
all SCSI so I don't have any numbers to back that up.
But one of my clients needs a new docs server, so maybe I can give an Escalade
a spin.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco