[olug] SATA Drives

[Chris St. Pierre]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Curtis LaMasters wrote:

> Some of they guy's in my company complain that SATA drives are worthless and
> should NEVER be installed in a server platform.  I just wanted to know your
> take on the situation.  My personal belief is match the server specs to it's
> requirements.  Enough said.

FUD.

As others have pointed out, putting any drive in a non-redundant
configuration is begging for data loss.  I've seen both SATA and SCSI
drives fail, and wouldn't put any considerable faith in either of
them.

OTOH, we can afford to buy a lot of SATA disks, which lets us pump up
both our storage size and the redundancy we can offer -- and usually
also the speed, with fancy things like RAID 10 and RAID 50 (not using
yet, but hopefully soon).

SATA certainly isn't the solution for everything or everyone, but
neither is SCSI.

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University