Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
Now? no. Tomorrow? I expect so. They'll trickle down into the system, driven by the overclockers and gamers of this world.In all honesty, I'd buy an AMD64 based ATA machine, and use software raid to enhance performance. That's what I see as best value for a grunty machine atm.
That's what I currently think too.
1. The top end disks are re-jigged SCSI disks, and can act more asynchronously given the right drivers ( getting further away from IDE ), as Delio said. They also tend to spin faster - up to 15,000rpm.
The only commonly sold SATA disks I see are 7200rpm, not having checked many suppliers. Would a 15000rpm SATA disk be cheaper than a 15000rpm SCSI one?
Many ( most? ) motherboards have it built-in. Stuff 4 x SATA on 2 x interfaces, and you've got some serious performance potential.3. Hardware raid is (allegedly) available.
Same for PATA, and that's confirmed by users on either this or the
Auckland list. You lose the price advantage though - decent PATA raid
cards are $800 for 2 disks, >$1000 for 3 disks. Are equivalent SATA raid
cards significantly cheaper?
It cost me the prive of a caddy ( well, I bought 4, actually! ). About 50something dollars from dove.
I find the hot swap ability to be really useful
Yes this is an advantage for a server (not a desktop). SCSI raid is also
hot-swappable though - is the SATA solution cheaper?
Our Canadian friends over at LaCie were looking seriously into it last time I was throwing large amounts of data around - mid 2003. Haven't looked into it since, really, due being really poor these days!
Personally, I think that the bandwidth of firewire may well raise it's head a bit more for major storage.
Currently the bandwidth of firewire (500 or so Mbit/s) and USB2 (about the same) is for practical purposes identical. Do you have a firewire interface which is much faster than that? I'm talking practice here, not theory. How are you thinking of turning this into major storage?
Volker
For ultimate performance, and good all-round central heating... did you ever get anywhere with your grid computing Delio???
Cheers,
Steve
