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RAID SCSI or SATA???

Question

Hi,

we are moving to a new server because we want to have two Raid 1 disks. We wanted to have them SCSI with hardware Raid but the provider we have contacted wants to give us two SATA drives with Raid software... in my opinion this is not a good solution but I don't have any experience with SATA drives.. any suggesition?

Answer

1. be sure its a 10000 rpm SATA drives (there are 7200 rpm drives wich is as slow as IDE). We tested WD Raptors recently - they are hell fast!!

2. anyway SCSI faster :-)

3. if your current HD write rate isn't really big - you could go with software raid - it's cheaper, but i would go with inexpensive SATA controller anyway.

SATA RAID is the same as SCSI - controllers are the same in terms of reliabity, mechanical parts of scsi & sata sometimes are equal too. But SCSI is smarter (for example it could sort commands in controller memory - so drive could perform it more efficiency), so it means it make less load for HDs and it means more reliable.

In your case, I wouldn't go with software RAID, I would get SCSI or SATA controller and hotswapable drives in mirror (there's no big difference for hotswapable mirrored drives - if one fail - just replace it).