Consumer Storage In The Enterprise - Thoughts?
There has been much debate lately as to the effectiveness and reliability of consumer-level storage technology in the enterprise space. This article on Dell's future or storage website, details some of the specific considerations and decisions IT managers may have to make...
The SCSI command set for error reporting and handling is significantly more robust. If a drive starts going bad in a RAID volume with SATA, the controller may or may not alert you before the drive goes completely offline. SAS on the other hand will give you a much more detailed view into what’s going on with a RAID volume, potentially allowing you to get that hot spare in for a rebuild sooner. For the average consumer, SATA has it all over SAS with its cost per gigabyte ratio that absolutely blows SAS drives out of the water."
"The fact of the matter is if you’re working with an enterprise application and cost isn’t the only driving factor but uptime and rebuild times are critical, there’s a really strong case for SAS technology, though SATA is a tempting low-cost alternative to be sure. In practice though, SATA drives don’t have the same level of status handling and error reporting that SAS drives do. SAS drives utilize SCSI commands, while SATA drives rely on ATA Smart Monitoring reports.
What do you all think? Is SATA ready for the enterprise space, or should IT managers stick with products specifically designed for the enterprise? We're interested in hearing what you all have to say on the matter.
The Data Center, HotHardware's new community for IT professionals, is sponsored by Dell's Future of Storage. This article is part of our ongoing series of topics and discussions related to IT, Enterprise Storage and related storage technologies.
