SATA Reliability - why is there no tests??

[lyall]

Hi,

I like many other readers out there get frustrated that no sites like Toms hardware site have not done reliability tests on SATA RAID Vs SCSI RAID. RAID is like insurance, it’s only as good as then time in when you need it. I know that SATA II is suppose to be more reliable than SATA, but why don't HP etc release servers with SATA II rather than still sticking to SATA? I have read many articles indicating that if a hard disk fails due to a power spike etc, then SATA RAID will fall over where as SCSI will work. Isn't this the main cause of a hard drive failing? I'm not really impressed that SATA RAID is just as fast as SCSI because disk speed access for a business opening 100KB-1MB documents is not an issue yet there are a number of articles on sites like toms hardware discussing speed, but no one tackles reliability. I'm after the reliable system and there is no data/statistics out there in guiding people to make the right decisions. Can you please fix this Tom?

Cheers
Lyall Dilkes

 

[lyall]

Have a look at this link:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1044956.1044961

a quote is:
"Today's SATA drive specifications for unrecoverable block errors appear to allow stripe reconstruction failure, and additional in-drive parity blocks are suggested as a solution."

Check this link out - pg 7
http://www.sata-io.org/docs/SATA%20Enterprise%20WP.pdf


The phrase you where refering to before, I meant that SATA II is a more reliable standard than SATA I. I was not refering to the physcial disks as such.

 

[lyall]

Sorry, shouldn't do two reply posts but the question was why is their no test done to prove the reliability of SATA? What the point of haivng RAID 5 or 6 if in aint going to work when a disk fails?

I'm sure a lot of readers would be interested to know that there investment into data redundancy is consider by some to be questionable.

I don't have enough knowledge to know this but know that a lot of people are saying that SATA RAID 5 doesn't work when it needs to.

 

[etp777]

SATA Raid 5 works fine with a drive dead, otherwise it wouldn't be raid.

And in reference tto whether Toms and others tests these, have you even looked at any of Tom's raid articles? jsut for a quick example

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/31/sata_spells_trouble_for_scsi_raid/page13.html

Half the benchmarks there are with raid drive crashed

 

[RichPLS]

There is no doubting that SCSI is generally better quality and reliablity than IDE or SATA, and also SCSI drives generally score a lot higher with i/o requests, which is prefered in a server environment.
So SATA is geared for home users or entry servers. Simple.
If you want or need to spend 2x or more for your drive subsystem, go ahead.