ATA Reliability: Seagate, WD, Maxtor

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:11:33 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
"Rita Ä Berkowitz" ritaberk2O04 @aol.com wrote:

Curious George wrote:

Companies that are trying to make SATA fit better for larger
enterprise scenario make boxes with a SATA-SCSI bridge. These are
not bargain basement/soho cheap & you're still using scsi cabling &
HBA's so the economics are somewhat questionable. Very questionable
if using Raptors.

This is just as effective and just as foolish as putting a 3.5HP Brigs &
Stratton lawnmower engine in a Porsche 911. If you want a system to be like
SCSI you should just buy SCSI in the first place. All this dicking around
doesn't change the fact that all the wasted money and time you threw at SATA
will ever get you to square one.

In other words it makes a lot of sense.

No. She's actually right. In other words you're just arguing for
argument's sake.

In short 50 SATA spindles per computer is indeed a mess & not as cheap
as you think.

Why screw with them in the first place? I can see if you're building a
novelty toy gaming system for your teenage children you might have
something, but deploying this crap in an enterprise environment is totally
and utterly foolish.

So why is everyone doing that?

Who said everyone?

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 18:53:04 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
Curious George wrote:

On Sat, 16 Apr 2005 19:16:32 GMT, flux wrote:

In article 1113587080.671422@smirk,
(Ralph Becker-Szendy) wrote:

The smallest computer room of mine in the last 8 or so years had 6
racks worth of equipment. The largest has maybe 40 or 50 racks (I
haven't counted, since it is shared with a few other people, I know
which racks are mine). This doesn't count a large computer room where
I was only in charge of a small part (my part was 4 racks, but the
whole room must have had several hundred racks worth, as big as 2
football fields; rumor has it that it had over 3000 servers in it).

I wonder how else of this is just rumor.

Try connecting a few hundred disks in 4 or 5 racks with SATA cables.

Why would you need ANY SATA cables to connect them? There is this thing
called a backplane. Surely, there must be a few of these in that big
computer room of yours.

Because it's point to point stupid. If there are, say 7 disks
connected to a normal backplane you need to connect 7 cables to the
backplane. That's the purpose of the Serial ATA II Port Multiplier

That's only if you are connecting the backplane to card. Otherwise, you don't need any cables.

That doesn't make any sense. Utterly clueless

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:07:59 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
Curious George wrote:

& one more thing- you also have to connect the anode & diode wires for
the drive activity from the controller to the backplane. It gets so
messy that some of the larger controllers don't even bother with
individual drive activity.

That's true and it's just dumb.

Ah we finally agree

This is why presently the external soho boxes group the drives into a
single logical unit and connect to the computer on one SATA channel -
but that means max bandwidth is now 150 MB/sec minus overhead for all

SOHO boxes? Single channels across the whole box? Who's doing that?

IIRC this family of products
http://www.firewiredirect.com/store/...me.php?cat=423
The array appears as a single unit connected via either FireWire800,
USBv2.0/1.1 or SATA Interface

the drives in the external box in addition to any other limitations/
inefficiencies of this uncommon, low-end solution.

Companies that are trying to make SATA fit better for larger
enterprise scenario make boxes with a SATA-SCSI bridge. These are
not bargain basement/soho cheap & you're still using scsi cabling &
HBA's so the economics are somewhat questionable. Very questionable
if using Raptors.

The economics aren't questionable if you want space. For that, you can't beat Hitachi 7K400s.

Yes and no- as has been explained ad nauseum

In short 50 SATA spindles per computer is indeed a mess & not as cheap
as you think.

Yes, it is.

Ah we finally agree

flux wrote:

Because it's point to point stupid. If there are, say 7 disks
connected to a normal backplane you need to connect 7 cables to the
backplane. That's the purpose of the Serial ATA II Port Multiplier
Technology which for all intensive purposes is vaporware or at least
immature.

All of which renders it unpractical and useless in real world
applications, except, of course, in AMD boxes, which nobody real
cares about anyway. SCSI

In other words, they are rapidly becoming popular.

So are the PS2, X-Box, and the Game Cube. This doesn't mean that I would
want to pretend that these games are any more than, well, just games. I
wouldn't want to run the TSA's software on a Game Cube nor would I on
anything SATA or AMD based. I think you'll find SATA and AMD are about as
hard to find on a TSA site as a glacier in the middle of the Mohave Desert.



Rita

flux wrote:

This is just as effective and just as foolish as putting a 3.5HP
Brigs & Stratton lawnmower engine in a Porsche 911. If you want a
system to be like SCSI you should just buy SCSI in the first place.
All this dicking around doesn't change the fact that all the wasted
money and time you threw at SATA will ever get you to square one.

In other words it makes a lot of sense.

Sure, it makes a lot of sense if all you want is to have higher numbers
(storage) without any performance and reliability (SATA) for the sake of,
well high numbers. I guess posers infect all walks of life and areas when
it comes to hardware? Hey, if it makes you feel better to brag about
massive amounts of storage (penis envy) without performance or reliability,
go ahead and knock yourself out.

In short 50 SATA spindles per computer is indeed a mess & not as
cheap as you think.

Why screw with them in the first place? I can see if you're
building a novelty toy gaming system for your teenage children you
might have something, but deploying this crap in an enterprise
environment is totally and utterly foolish.

So why is everyone doing that?

So why are so many Catholic priests molesting children? Just because there
are a group or large number of people doing it doesn't make it right.



Rita

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 18:45:02 -0400, "Rita Ä Berkowitz" ritaberk2O04
@aol.com wrote:

So why is everyone doing that?

So why are so many Catholic priests molesting children?

And why do rabbis & ministers do that also at roughly th same rate?
That's a bad example. Anti-catholicism is just as bad as anti
Semitism. You should be more sensitive to this.

Just because there
are a group or large number of people doing it doesn't make it right.

Is this SATA- SCSI stuff really all that common? Depends on what
you're looking at I guess. Flux believes it could be common because
he likes it - but post after post admits to having no knowledge of or
experience with any of the products or concepts cited in this thread.
Let's not humor his guess-based inferences as fact.

"Rita Ä Berkowitz" ritaberk2O04 @aol.com writes:
I think you'll find SATA and AMD are about as
hard to find on a TSA site as a glacier in the middle of the Mohave Desert.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...type=printable


Advanced Micro Devices' new server chip will be the centerpiece of
Cray Inc.'s $90 million project to build a supercomputer for the
Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore. ...

The supercomputer, which will contain 10,000 of AMD's 64-bit Opteron
chips, will be among the fastest systems in the world, said Kenneth
Johnson, general counsel at Cray, which is based in Seattle.

Paul Rubin wrote:

Advanced Micro Devices' new server chip will be the centerpiece of
Cray Inc.'s $90 million project to build a supercomputer for the
Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore. ...

The supercomputer, which will contain 10,000 of AMD's 64-bit Opteron
chips, will be among the fastest systems in the world, said Kenneth
Johnson, general counsel at Cray, which is based in Seattle.

That's old news. The sole purpose for this beast is to generate heat. If
it weren't for the high heat generating properties of the Opteron they
surely would have used the Itanium2. Though, I must say I could generate
heat more efficiently and cheaper using a 40KW load bank.



Rita

Curious George wrote:

So why are so many Catholic priests molesting children?

And why do rabbis & ministers do that also at roughly th same rate?
That's a bad example. Anti-catholicism is just as bad as anti
Semitism. You should be more sensitive to this.

Name one child molestation case involving a Rabbi? It wasn't meant to sound
anti-catholic.

Just because there
are a group or large number of people doing it doesn't make it right.

Is this SATA- SCSI stuff really all that common? Depends on what
you're looking at I guess. Flux believes it could be common because
he likes it - but post after post admits to having no knowledge of or
experience with any of the products or concepts cited in this thread.
Let's not humor his guess-based inferences as fact.

Don't get me wrong since SATA has its place. SATA will eventually be the
wave of the future for all over-the-counter consumer appliances; it's not
that we'll see that happening in the next decade, though. The issue I have
is when you see a piece of technology (SATA) do its best to emulate
something it's trying to replace (SCSI) and not being able to do it well.
And when it even gets to be a contender it will be just as expensive as
SCSI/FC. So, I only see limited benefit to using SATA in non-critical
applications in the near future.



Rita

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 21:03:34 -0400, "Rita Ä Berkowitz" ritaberk2O04
@aol.com wrote:

Curious George wrote:

So why are so many Catholic priests molesting children?

And why do rabbis & ministers do that also at roughly th same rate?
That's a bad example. Anti-catholicism is just as bad as anti
Semitism. You should be more sensitive to this.

Name one child molestation case involving a Rabbi? It wasn't meant to sound
anti-catholic.

This is a storage group not a religious or child molestation group so
I don't want to get into a discussion of specific cases. I also don't
want to be involved in posts which may appear (albeit incorrectly) to
smear rabbis, ministers or the media just I don't like to see smearing
priests.

The most important people in my life are survivors or were friends of
the family involved in the resistance movement or helping Jews (yes
there were Catholic clergy who saved Jews also). The lessons from
that generation are supposed to teach everyone to be more tolerant and
less susceptible to "mob rule" or ignorance-based cruelty. I bring
this up so you understand my slant, not to introduce a contentious
historical debate to this group.

It is a simple fact that this type of abuse, as well as other sexual
scandals, occur in every social realm, your familiarity or amount of
news-time notwithstanding. If you're interested there are public
criminal records including statistics and newspaper articles at your
disposal. It's irresponsible and a bit naive to believe headline
frequency is representative of what's going on in the world and that
the headlines tell the whole story.

Just because there
are a group or large number of people doing it doesn't make it right.

True.

Is this SATA- SCSI stuff really all that common? Depends on what
you're looking at I guess. Flux believes it could be common because
he likes it - but post after post admits to having no knowledge of or
experience with any of the products or concepts cited in this thread.
Let's not humor his guess-based inferences as fact.

Don't get me wrong since SATA has its place. SATA will eventually be the
wave of the future for all over-the-counter consumer appliances; it's not
that we'll see that happening in the next decade, though. The issue I have
is when you see a piece of technology (SATA) do its best to emulate
something it's trying to replace (SCSI) and not being able to do it well.
And when it even gets to be a contender it will be just as expensive as
SCSI/FC. So, I only see limited benefit to using SATA in non-critical
applications in the near future.

We're not disagreeing on this. I've been citing everything I could
think of to explain (in plain English) why SATA (at this time) makes
little sense in _most_ normal & important storage environments. I did
leave out the 3ware Multilane connections, for example, to see if Flux
might engage me on it when discussing his 50 spindle example. But it
appears to be just another thing he's never heard of or seen.