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Date:      Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:25:12 -0600
From:      Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>
To:        Wilko Bulte <wb@freebie.xs4all.nl>
Cc:        Bill Swingle <unfurl@dub.net>, Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: problems with Hitachi 1TB SATA drives
Message-ID:  <46A65218.5050808@samsco.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070724183441.GA37120@freebie.xs4all.nl>
References:  <46A54B6F.9010100@dub.net>	<20070724044208.GA79101@eos.sc1.parodius.com>	<200707241518.35730.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>	<200707241230.53119.josh@tcbug.org>	<20070724182604.GA3759@eos.sc1.parodius.com> <20070724183441.GA37120@freebie.xs4all.nl>

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Wilko Bulte wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 11:26:04AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote..
>> On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 12:30:49PM -0500, Josh Paetzel wrote:
>>> I don't have any experience with the Hitachi 1TB SATA drives, but I 
>>> know an outfit that was trying out the Seagate 1TB drives and had 8 
>>> out of 12 fail their burn-in (a 3 day torture test)  My luck with 
>>> consumer SATA drives has been incredibly dismal, with ~40 of them in 
>>> service I see multiple failures a year, including drives being DOA 
>>> and dying after a few weeks of service.  I wouldn't be at all 
>>> surprised if one or both of the drives was bad right out of the box.  
> 
>> makes backing up 300GB+ of data easy.  Everything that's capable of
>> doing this is in the tens of thousands of US dollars, if not more.  Am I
>> going to sit around once a week backing up a terabyte of data to ~120
>> dual-layer 8.5GB DVDs?  Nope.  The closest thing out there right now is
> 
> Which are only available in write-once in dual-layer so you would soon have
> a landfill worth of DVDs.
> 
>> A new IOMega REV (which includes one 70GB disk) costs US$600 MSRP.  You
>> read that right.
> 
> Pff.  Find a pre-owned SuperDLT or LTO drive?  Not the cheapest I guess,
> but dual-layer DVDs are not a solution IMHO.
> 
> Or get a Blu-ray disk?  Also still $$ 
> 
> I'm using an LTO2 drive myself.
> 
>> * SCSI is outrageously expensive even in 2007.  I have yet to see any
>> shred of justification for why SCSI costs so much *even today*.  It
>> costs only a smidgen less than it did 15 years ago.
>>

For non-silly  benchmarks, SCSI/SAS/FC is still far superior to SATA,
and that is what you as the consumer are paying for.  But without those
high margins, you as the consumer won't have SATA either, at least not
in the current business model.  How do you think that R&D gets funded at
drive companies?  It's definitely not from the razor-thin margins that
SATA has.  Companies like WD make it work by having a very diverse
business to fund SATA, but that's really no different than having
SCSI/SAS/FC to fund SATA (though maybe less volatile).

>> * SCSI is on its way out.  Seagate recently announced that
>> they'll no longer be supporting SCSI products, possibly by the end of
>> next year:

Yes, Seagate might be saying this, and I won't comment on the wisdom of
it, other than to say that SAS/FC is not dead despite what Seagate
wishes to do.  In the future flash storage might ultimately overtake and
replace platter storage, but that future has not yet arrived.

>>
>> "Seagate has announced that by next year they will no longer be
>> supporting SCSI product and will be moving customers to the SATA
>> interface."
>> http://www.horizontechnology.com/news/market/market_perspective_storage_04-11-2007.php
> 
> I imagine this is meant to read as: parallel SCSI, as opposed to SAS.
> SAS is very much alive.
> 

If Seagate is plotting a course to be a SATA-only company, I'm not
terribly surprised.  I would be saddened, though, and I feel sorry for
my friends and neighbors who are currently Seagate employees.

Scott




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