SCSI or SATA

Which is better depends on your application.

For a home or stand-alone system, I would choose a SATA drive. Mainly for ease of use, and cost versus performance.

For a network server, SCSI is still the way to go.

SATA is still on a fairly steep portion of the evolution curve. Even 6 months from now, adding capacity to a SATA RAID array may be problematic.

With SCSI, the change curve is fairly stable. Drive models and capacities don't change nearly as often as SATA or IDE.

As far as speed, SATA is presently running the equivalent of ATA 150. Roughly 13 percent faster than an ATA133 IDE drive.

Chas

Chas is generally correct. If it's a server with large, fast storage requirements, then SCSI is the way to go. SATA will suffice for a small server.

Maximum PC Mag tested WD Raptor 10K RPM drives against 10K RPM and 15K RPM SCSI ultra 320 drives and found that the 10K Raptors generally outperformed 10K SCSI drives in normal single user applications and were fairly close to the 15K SCSI drives. Servers would be another story.

Home PC or small server, SATA is more than adequate and considerably cheaper especially in RAID 1 configurations.

Large file server, SCSI is superior in all respects except cost.

Dalton

I would normally agree with what the other guys are saying... but...

I recently built a file server for my office, and I have both a SCSI raid bus and a SATA raid bus, specifically because #1 I wanted to get the data off the SCSI onto the SATA, and 2, to play with performance tests.

My blinged-out box is a Soyo Dragon KT-880 Motherboard, 2 gigs of PC3200 DDR2, athlon xp 2800+ and GeForce 5700LE 256mb video.

The SATA interface is built into the board, 4 channels.

The SCSI bus is on an Adaptec card whose model number eludes me at the moment.

I have a Seagate Baracuda 120gig IDE drive as the boot drive and general system storage.

The SATA raid is composed of 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 9+ 250gig drives at 7200 RPM. They cost me $159 each, last week, brand new retail box from a local retailer. (Read: I could have gotten them cheaper online)

The SCSI raid is composed of 2 72gig IBM hard drives running at 7200 rpm. They cost me a lot more, about 2 years ago, from an OEM reseller.
Even today, 181 gig SCSI drives are $400+ each.

The 70 gig copy took about 9 minutes, a fair speed for a simple transfer, including the mirroring.

Later, I put both arrays thru their paces, and the SATA system beat the SCSI by a small margin. (average 3-20% improvement in most areas)

So, considering I have now over 3 times the storage space, a SLIGHTLY faster transfer rate, and paid a hell of a lot less for the drives and controller, I am pretty well convinced that SATA is a better all around package.

HOWEVER, I am not blind, and before I put any serious dedication and reliability on the line, I will continue to keep a close eye on the SATA specification in general, as it is still new, and it would be a great shame if it went the way of BetaMax.

Already they are talking about new revisions of SATA.

.02 if you want it.

A

side note, I also have a Dell Dim 8300 with a 120gig SATA raid in it, factory spec, and it runs like a charm.

All previous answers have valid points but surely it depends on what the manufacturers think. I have noticed that many IDE drive makers have dropped to a 1 year warranty compared to 3years previously so obviously they have some doubts. All SCSI drives I can find have 3 year warrnty at least.

Ultra320 SCSI is the seventh generation of SCSI I/O technology. Its dominant feature is its increased speed of 320 MBytes per second.

SATA is a serial interface that currently caps out at 150 MBytes per second. SATA forcast is for speed doubling every three years.

Good Luck Lee