The Truth About SATA Storage: Separating Perception from Reality
(Note from Uri: Today’s post is contributed by RADirect Systems Engineer Steve Insdorf)
“You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.”
Yes, this is absolutely an overused movie reference (it’s from “The Matrix” if you’re stumped). However, it’s a very appropriate starting point for this entry.
One of the greatest points of debate in data storage is the interface with which the drive is allocated. FC and SCSI drives have generally been granted ‘enterprise’ status by the industry because of their greater throughput and perceived higher reliability as compared to IDE/ATA or SATA storage. But things aren't always what they seem.
An interesting data storage site called storagemojo.com recently summarized a study by Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson from Carnegie Mellon University entitled: "Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?"
One of the key take-aways is as follows:
“Interestingly, we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA storage drives, potentially an indication that disk-independent factors, such as operating conditions, affect replacement rates more than component specific factors.”
In layman’s terms, what this means is that the PC you have at home stuffed under your desk with little ventilation, and the laptop you throw into your car after a long day at work, more than likely have disk drives based on IDE/SATA technology. Ironically, these drives are often as reliable as their FC or SCSI counterparts carefully secured in their rack mounted cabinets in temperature-controlled data centers.
So, despite what some companies with obvious agendas work hard to make us believe about SATA storage performance, there’s no doubt in my mind that it is absolutely enterprise-ready.