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Old October 28th 04, 12:48 AM
AFN
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"General Schvantzkoph" wrote in message
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On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:51:17 +0000, AFN wrote:

I need to buy some drives for a company server, to be used in a RAID
configuration. I'm used to buying SCSI drives, because I love 1) that
they feel cool to the touch when running and 2) they have a high "mean

time
between failure" number (MTBF). I just hate the price of SCSI drives

and
this is for a small business.

Now, I see that SATA drives have a good MTBF number comparable to SCSI.

So
I'm thinking of buying the Maxtor 9 or 10 series SATA drives or the WD
Raptors that spin at 10k. They all have MTBF numbers like SCSI drives

but
can someone tell me how cool or hot they are to the touch?

If an IDE (regular ATA) drive runs warm/hot, and a SCSI drive in the

same
enclosure runs cool, where does SATA fall? Does anyone know from
experience touching these drives while they're running?


SATA and ATA drives are exactly the same drives except for the interface
so they will run at the same temperature. I'd suggest using Seagate
drives, I've found them to be very reliable. Avoid Maxtor, they are the
least reliable drives on the planet. The highest performance SATA
7200RPM drives right now are the Hitachi (formerly IBM) drives. IBM had a
terrible reliablity problem a couple of years ago, I don't know how they
are doing now. The best place to look for informantion on drive
performance, including temperature and noise, is at
http://www.storagereview.com.




I don't believe that the SATA drives are the same as regular IDE/ATA. They
boast double the MTBF numbers, comparable to SCSI. I'm not an expert, and
I'm inviting debate, but I believe you're wrong to say they are the same
except for the interface. Surely some components inside must be different
if the MTBF numbers is double (and comparable to SCSI).