Re: Consumer-grade vs enterprise-grade disk drives

On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 21:38 -0700, Luke Lonergan wrote:
> Tom,
> 
> This is a story that is evolving.  Anyone else use StorageReview?  Great
> comprehensive drive benchmarks:
>   http://www.storagereview.com/
> 
> Check the comparisons between 15K RPM SCSI drives and the 2004 Western
> Digital 10K RPM SATA (Raptor) drives.  The Raptors are an interesting hybrid
> of SCSI-related tech and desktop tech, and were some of the first drives
> with SCSI-like command queuing TCQ/NCQ.

If we're looking at the same benchmark (File Server DriveMark), the
fastest SCSI disk is 65% faster than the fastest SATA disk.  The fastest
SCSI 10K disk is 25% faster than the SATA.

> I think the last remaining issue in moving to SATA for all enterprise use is
> the lack of decent SATA controllers, though 3Ware (http://www.3ware.com) is
> getting there:
>   http://www.3ware.com/link/pdf/Serial-ATA.pdf
>   http://www.3ware.com/products/benchmarks_sata.asp


The 3Ware controllers are probably the worst ones you can get for
database use.  Their caches are slow (I didn't even know that was
possible until I bought one), as are the XOR engines.

After reading this very comprehensive benchmark:

http://print.tweakers.net/?reviews/557

I purchased one of the Areca controllers with a large battery-backed
cache.  It is unholy fast.  I recommend it.

-jwb