SCSI vs SATA for multi-user environments...

[acole1]

Right now at work we are planning a system upgrade, and we are trying to figure out if SCSI has any benefit over SATA II with NCQ these days, especially in multi-user environments.

While looking for servers I noticed that very few Dell servers still offer SCSI, and SATA seems to be the standard drive.

That's fine for most of our servers, but because of the addition of several more users, our system will become much more disk intensive. We want the best performance but we aren't sure if SATA will cut it or not.

Do any of you know of some charts or articles with benchmarks and data that show the performance differences between these drives?

I found one here but as you can see, it's rather old and out dated.

Thanks!

 

[Blain]

15K SCSI

 

[acole1]

Originally posted by: Blain
15K SCSI

Thats what we are thinking...

But the cost premium is hard to swallow. Dell charges $600 more for a 300GB 15k SCSI than it does for a 250GB SATA.

A 73gb 15k is about $350, and a 146gb 15k is about $550.

 

[Blain]

Is your employer locked into buying off the shelf servers or are they open to you building them?
How many employees does the company have working for it?
What type of business is it?

 

[acole1]

Originally posted by: Blain
Is your employer locked into buying off the shelf servers or are they open to you building them?
How many employees does the company have working for it?
What type of business is it?

We buy most PC's and servers from Dell through a rep. We have been trying to standardize our system because before it was a jumbled mess of Frankenstein-ed systems - which makes it much harder to manage.

A big advantage of getting the Dells (for us) is the warranty and dependability that comes with them. We really only built the less critical servers ourselves and this one would be the most mission critical server in the company.

For this project, since it is so big/important to the company, we pretty much have a blank check for hardware purchases, but we would like to not just waste money if we can help it. Hence the question.

Employees - about 150-200 PC users and 20-50 thin client terminals.

It's a manufacturing buis. with 1 main branch and 3 remote branches. We make sheet metal/steel products for air ducts and the like.