On 5/22/07, Carl Lowenstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 5/22/07, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, May 22, 2007 4:00 pm, Carl Lowenstein wrote: > > On 5/22/07, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > SATA (Serial ATA) uses a different data transmission scheme (serial on > > 2 wires rather than parallel on 40 wires). Probably faster in data > > transmission, although the over-all data rate is limited by the disk > > drive or the motherboard, whichever is faster. It requires a > > different controller on the motherboard, with the concomitant > > difference in cables and connectors. One can buy SATA controllers > > that plug into the motherboard PCI backplane. > > > > So if you are upgrading an old system you probably don't want SATA. > > Unless you are upgrading it by getting a new disk drive to put into an > > external box. Then you can get a box that connects to the rest of the > > world by USB or Firewire or Ethernet, and has the right kind of > > internals to fit your disk drive. > > And are you implying that PATA is the *ATA that is usually more expensive?The disk drives are about the same price. In fact, I just looked again at frys.com and found that they have 500GB Maxtor drives in either SATA or PATA flavor for the same $99. New construction should be also about the same price, possibly a bit less for SATA because the construction overhead for the 4-wire cable is less than for the 40 (which is really 80) cable. Requires a custom logic chip, but they are cheap to produce once the design has been finished. If you are adding or replacing an internal disk in your existing system, SATA will most likely not work because the motherboard wasn't designed that way. (My small Dell server just gets in under the wire, having the classical 4 PATA ports and also 2 SATA). It isn't a problem of expense, just of being compatible with an existing system. carl --
One question in my mind was how much disk on each work station versus disk on the NAS (or other attached file store, e.g. ala Andrew's suggestions). My thought was to put aabout 100 GB on the workstations and a TB or so on the NAS. Not a lot of need for local hard disk. I would rather spend local money on RAM. Indeed I can almost see going diskless on the workstations and putting every workstation dollar into RAM with all the disk as NAS (or equivalent ala Andrew.) I would think such a development work group would be a pretty common problem. Thoughts? As I think about it I wonder about a peer to peer logical RAID where each disk is on each workstation. Is there anything like that out there? What if we consider the system as a loosely coupled cluster with multiple users? A model more like EC2 ... hmmm. I think I am getting carried away. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
