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Sata or SataII v Scsi?

C

Chuk213

Junior Member
Looking a replacing an old server in my office. Application - MS SQL 2000 database.
The current old server is ancient and runs a PentiumII 450, 500M Ram with Ultra Wide Scsi drives in a Win NT softare Mirror.

I was thinking of building a new system with current Opteron or Xeon processor and suitable memory. Likely OS - Win 2000 or 2003 Server - However, I was thinking of trying to reduce costs and use Sata drives in mirror raid or Raid 0&1 array instead of Expensive Scsi Drives. Thinkin maybe Raptors or SataII drives.

Question1: Would the speed of either of these drives likely be an improvement over the old drives.

In terms of data integrity understand that Scsi drives are better than Sata.
Question2: Why? - Does it relate to command queing?
Question3: Where will SataII be compared to Sata and Scsi in regards to data integrity?

Any Views?



 
A good hardware SCSI RAID (I suggest RAID5) will kill an SATA setup.

/dangles a Seagate Cheetah in the air
Here, mechBgon ... come and get it! 😀

- M4H
 
If you were getting by on that configuration, I don't see why you would need an Opteron or Xeon as an upgrade. Would look like extreme overkill. If you want to save serious money, skip the Xeon and Opteron system, and try one of the workstation P4 boards from Supermicro or Tyan. The reason for recommending P4, has nothing to do with Intel vs AMD, so lets not start another flame war on that. I'm simply recommending the P4 platform since you have a much better selection of workstation/server class boards which makes it more likely you'll find what you need. Also, companies like Supermicro don't even offer AMD based boards.

Again, if you are running on Ultra Wide SCSI drives now, anything you buy today will be a serious upgrade, including some laptop drives. Mirrored Raptors should be plenty and not require any additional hardware purchases.

SCSI has better data integrity because the interface has more robust forms of error detection and correction. It's not related to TCQ.

SATA II is basically identical to SATA I. The odds of you experiencing data corruption with SATA that the SCSI interface could have prevented is practically zero. You have a significantly better chance of experiencing drive failure than interface data corruption, and drive failure is pretty rare.
 
Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
A good hardware SCSI RAID (I suggest RAID5) will kill an SATA setup.

/dangles a Seagate Cheetah in the air
Here, mechBgon ... come and get it! 😀

- M4H
Click to expand...
Knock it off, I'm just about to go to bed and now I'll have teh naughtay dreams 😱

(drool)


Not sure I see how SCSI is necessarily "expensive." 36GB 10000rpm SCSI drives, brand new current-generation ones, are around the same price as a 74GB Raptor. And I doubt you need the higher capacity of the 74GB drives. If your database ceases to fit on a 36GB array, you're probably in trouble anyway 😉

Yeah, you would want to pick up a SCSI RAID card of some sort, LSI Logic 21320R for mirroring if you don't want to be too extravagant. At retail, that would set you back another couple hundred dollars. Still, that's pocket change over the course of a five-year lifespan for a business tool IMHO... hold a bake sale or something? 😉

/ 2¢ worth
 
Thanks all for you input,

Couple of things -

The current machine is old and very slow - On looking at the Memory again it has even less than i originally stated only (384Mb Ram) and this is one of the many reasons it is so slow.

I also don't really care so much about processors make - just performance for the task.
I see from some of the early tests of the opterons that there really was't so much diffence in performance between those and the fastest p4s of the time.
The opterons do run fairly cool though, and this was a consideration in my office in Australia, in summer, where the air conditioning has not been too reliable of late.
I'll check out the P4 workstation idea though.

Raid 5 drive array may increase speed a bit but I still have reservations on the drive rebuild after disk failure - more a case of my lack of understanding than distrust founded on fact - Smoke and mirrors stuff.

Those Seagate Cheetahs are pretty reasonable - I think I may have been scared off the SCSI drives by a quote from a middleman - trying to inflate costs after dangling the carrot of a cheap propriety entry server.

Thanks your comments all.



 
Don't compare P4's to Opterons, and Don't compare AMD64's to Xeons.

An Opteron has a integrated dual channel memory controller per die, where Xeons rely on the northbrige. In quad vs quad Opterons are merciless to xeons, handing em thier own ass on a silver platter.

I personally would get a K8WE if I were you. It's far more scalable, and later you can upgrade to dual-dual-core.
 
Another option that may be better than anything you are looking at is to simply give Dell a call and see what they can make for you. I know it is practically sacrilege to recommend anything but building your own systems here, but Dell often offers some very good deals on lowend servers/workstations. When you factor in a complete system with a legal OS and 24-7 support, some of Dells offers are awfully hard to beat for a small business.
 
What about Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)??

This is essentially the next evolution of SCSI and it is pin-compatible with SATA devices. The difference is a SAS cable is essentially two SATA cables fused together, and the drives are all dual-ported like Fibre Channel drives.

SAS will allow for full-duplex transfers (i.e. 3Gb/s initial/6Gbps future), independent host controllers, multiple devices and all the good stuff from SCSI without all the termination issues. A SAS controller from Adaptec can also be used to run SATA drives.

**edit**

whoops, I just realized SAS stuff isn't available yet!

To answer your question, we'd need to know things like average queries/sec for your database, size of the database, # of clients accessing simultaneously and the amount of memory on the server. Most likely a Raptor SATA setup or SATA2 setup will be sufficient if you have <32 clients and enough memory.
 
The current platform is old and slow - better part of 6years old - But it is a commercial Grade Machine - Compaq Proliant 1600 - that never missed a beat.

The sql database is fairly small and is only used by 4 finacial staff as the backbone of a financial package. We are talking about a small company here. Application Software has had a recent upgrade but they kept the same OS/Hardware. So now the system is slower than ever.

Lets not get carried away guys. Hardware has come a long way in 6 years. My initial question related to the speed and data integrity of Sata drives compared to Scsi drives. Anything in the current generation of processors/mem/Motherboards is way fast enough.
And prefer to steer clear of "stripeing" Raid

I am more concerned about keeping the system Up and Stable.
I don't want to hear the words " You shouldn't have touched it".
and I want to stay under USD3500.00 including the new OS licence.
Dell probably is the way to go! (that will get the fireworks goin)- I just thought I might give it a go myself



Thanks all your comments so far - food for thought - regretfully confusion goes hand in hand.






 
Dell has raptors in some of their servers.. perhaps you can get a raid 1 or raid 5 of them? Raptor 74s will still be useful when SAS hits, even more so than they are now.
 
Originally posted by: Chuk213
The current platform is old and slow - better part of 6years old - But it is a commercial Grade Machine - Compaq Proliant 1600 - that never missed a beat.

The sql database is fairly small and is only used by 4 finacial staff as the backbone of a financial package. We are talking about a small company here. Application Software has had a recent upgrade but they kept the same OS/Hardware. So now the system is slower than ever.

Lets not get carried away guys. Hardware has come a long way in 6 years. My initial question related to the speed and data integrity of Sata drives compared to Scsi drives. Anything in the current generation of processors/mem/Motherboards is way fast enough.
And prefer to steer clear of "stripeing" Raid

I am more concerned about keeping the system Up and Stable.
I don't want to hear the words " You shouldn't have touched it".
and I want to stay under USD3500.00 including the new OS licence.
Dell probably is the way to go! (that will get the fireworks goin)- I just thought I might give it a go myself

Thanks all your comments so far - food for thought - regretfully confusion goes hand in hand.
Click to expand...

I would also agree with going with SCSI drives. A common setup that works well for most applications is a RAID 5 with three 36gb drives (or more if you have the budget). If your main concern is uptime, integrity and stability, then you won't want to do RAID1 or RAID 0. With mirroring, there is no safeguard against your machine writing bad data (it happens), then it just writes bad data to both drives. RAID0 isn't good either since technically there is no redundancy and by the time you feel the symptoms of a failing drive, your data might be corrupted by that point, making recovery possibly a complicated thing, and it takes more time. Especially true if you only keep a single day's backup (meaning you fail on Wed, you can only roll back as far as Tuesday), then your back ups reflect the bad data.

As far as processor and memory, anything would most likely do it for you, so just get as much as you can in your budget reflecting the RAID5 SCSI array with at least 3 drives at any speed.

As far as comparison's to drive to drive, i think the data integrity for a serial vs scsi is probably the same in regards to read/write errors, and performance is most likely getting blurred too, to my stance would be stick with SCSI, since it sounds like your company replaces hardware very slowly. I have never had a ide/ata style drive last longer than 3 or so years in a server setup. Good luck
 
Raid5 is what many small companies use. It use to be big companies also, but they have evelved to something else. It is not "smoke and mirrors" It stores part of the data on all the drives, so that is any one of them fails for any reason, the data can be rebuilt onto the new drive. Its called "hot-swapping" The old drive can be pulled out, and the new one inserted, and the system will slow down a bit until the rebuild finishes. It is amazing. But don;t skimp on a cheap controller, and get the Tyan 2885 motherboard with PCI-X for the controller.
 
you only need a u320-2x, or even a u320-1, and a motherboard to handle PCI-X (NOT express). SCSI will leave those raptors begging for mercy, and you can;t hot swap them. (AFAIK) And get 15k drives, not 10k.
 
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