[geeks] SATA Cards

[Phil Stracchino]

Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> Hmm.  Actually ... I'm going to have to do some price research to see if
>> that's really true.  If I needed new disk for a machine and either had
>> no existing good disk channel in place, or had existing SATA support,
>> I'm sure it would be.  But on a little further thought, since I already
>> have two perfectly good U160 SCSI controllers in the machine, a pair of
>> new SCSI disks may still be cheaper than a pair of new SATA disks *and*
>> a decent PCI SATA host controller.
> 
> If the tradeoff is capacity vs. money, I'd be very surprised if SCSI 
> were to win.

At this point, it's "cheapest total cost", even the smallest new drives
on the market being an order of magnitude bigger than what the machine
needs.  But actually, it turns out my original assumption stands.  Hard
disk storage has gotten insanely cheap ... IFF you can use SATA.  If you
want a *new* (not reconditioned) SCSI disk, you're pretty much fucked.
The entire SCSI disk market, aside from a few major-vendor-branded
pre-mounted server disks still priced at several dollars per gigabyte,
seems to be people reselling the same stock of multiply reconditioned
disks over and over.  It doesn't look like you can even buy SATA-1.5GB
disks new any more; everything new is SATA-3.0GB.

So I'm back to my starting point:  two inexpensive SATA disks of pretty
much any capacity, preferably 3.5", and a solid, reliable PCI SATA
controller supported by the Linux kernel.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.