We put 13 SAS and SCSI hard drives to the ultimate test. And we also launch our new Enterprise HDD Charts!

Not a bad article for those in the market for a SCSI/SAS drive .... I wish that you would have included a Raptor in the graphs and charts for reference.

I would have liked to seen how well the FC drives are doing in comparison to the new SAS segment.

That IBM drive looked almost to good to be true, it had a Windows XP startup time of just 3.6 seconds.

Oh my thats a problem.

Thats a performance benchmark. I believe higher is better for that graph.

If you check the bottom of the graph it's measuring MB/s not startup time in seconds.

Don't burst his bubble, we all need to dream. XP loading in 3.6 sec. ah, nirvana.

Raptor isnt there because this is an Enterprise drive comparison.

It focuses on SAS and SCSI, NOT SATA.

SATA makes it into Enterprise servers.... in fact HP pushes those just as much as the SAS based drives.

SATA makes it into Enterprise servers.... in fact HP pushes those just as much as the SAS based drives.

Not very true at all. Yes, they do have servers with SATA drives, but those are systems that don't require high disk throughput. For example, take the DL380, a good general purpose server be it a small database server, file serving, or web services, and it has the option for SATA drives, but nobody would choose that if they cared about throughput.

When you look at either blades or the DL100 series, those are very entry level servers, which are good for lightweight services for disk or clustered services, where you are looking for processor power.

Lol spend 8k on a server and put 50$ sata drives in it.

True, for any high-throughput application (SQL server, large file server, etc.) the SAS/SCSI drives benefit you greatly.

But sometimes, SATA is an overwhelming favorite.

Recently I needed to put together 6TB of space. I just couldn't do it with SCSI/SAS - I would have spent $25K+ just on the drives. With Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB SATA drives, I only spent about $4K.

Since they're all going into a decent RAID-5 SAN unit on iSCSI, throughput isn't an issue (the SAN can max out the iSCSI bandwidth with room to spare). And since they're Barracuda ES series (enterprise series), they should be in the reliability range of higher-end drives.

Funny how westerndigital.com has Raptors listed under ENTERPRISE DRIVES...they should have been in this ENTERPRISE DRIVE comparison regardless of interface. Not everyone requires more bandwidth, only a fast drive.

WRONG :!: A quote from the link below

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/p [...] anguage=en

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/p [...] anguage=en

WD may market it that way, but it's just marketing. If we believe that, then we should also accept every other manufacturer's claim for their products.

As a replacement for our current database server, there was no way I was going to throw 112 SATA (called FATA on our SAN) drives into an enclosure. They simply do not perform as well as their opponents in the same configuration under the same testing. What's with the huge font anyway?

Not sure what you mean there. Load up a hundred or so Raptor drives and you still cannot fill the bandwidth you have. That's a drive limitation, and that's why SATA/FATA drives are out of the picture.

Very true. If your host interface is limited to a theoretical maximum (125MB/sec for GigE) less than what the drives can deliver, there's no point in increasing drive throughput. I'm referring to a SAN where you are running 2 and 4Gb connections.

Interesting conversation.

I recently rolled out a db server that back ends for an e-commerce application. We had an internal discussion about SCSI vs. SATA and based on an article we found about some research Microsoft did for their mapping project we chose SATA figuring if the in-depth analysis MS did and wrote a white paper about made it good enough for that type of project then SATA was probably appropriate for us to consider.

The server that was being replaced was an Intel server with 2.8Ghz Hyperthreaded Xeons and 4Gb RAM with RAID 10 on Seagate 10K Cheetahs. The new one uses 2 X Dual Core Xeons with the same amount of RAM (probably faster, but I'd have to check) and RAID 10 on Raptors.

The new server is clearly faster than the older one but under heavy I/O load it is slower. We hang a USB drive off the server to do hourly db snapshots and this even takes slightly longer.

My vote is for SCSI or SAS, not Raptor in any server I really care about I/O on. Anything I don't really care about I/O on, I probably wouldn't use a Raptor on anymore because of the cost difference even though I am generally a fan of Raptors.

I was just jerking sandmanwn's chain, because he bolded the "NOT SATA". WD gives a five year warranty and and insists that the Raptor contains enterprise class components. What do you know, that I don't, that allows you to make the judgment that the Raptor is not an enterprise class drive and that it is just marketing on WDs part?

The fact they claim enterprise performance is what I'm against. An enclosure of SATA drives just doesn't match up performance-wise. For some applications, it fits just fine, even in the enterprise. But for high I/O operations, it doesn't cut it.

What do you know, that I don't, besides WD's claims, that makes it an enterprise drive?

Perhaps if the Raptor had been included in the review, this would be proven?

Yeah, but what can we do? Keep in mind, their tests may not reflect your usage. So, what may be true in one scenario is entirely false in another.

For example, comparing single drive's performance will yield you very little difference. However, using multiple drives in a different scenario will show you the differences in performance.