[rescue] A5000, 22x9.1GB, QLogic QLA2100F controller, asking $550

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 @ 17:38 -0500, nate at portents.com said:

> > Are there FC-AL drives around that don't reorder their operations for
> > performance/reliability?  There are quite a few SATA drives that don't.
> 
> Most current generation SATA drives do have NCQ, though of course it
> doesn't help much to have it on for single-user/workstation type tasks. 

What would make you say that?

TCQ certainly helps a hell of a lot on my desktop system, and NCQ is the same
basic idea.

> http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/storage/roundup-scsi2005.html
> 
> "Hitachi and Seagate drives make sense only if you plan a purely active
> server operation, as in most cases their performance slumps noticeably
> under simpler loads. In such cases WD Raptors often offer a better
> price/performance ratio. 

One caveat, which might no longer be true, is that Raptors (indeed a lot
of WD drives) don't have a great reputation for reliability.

Raptors in particular used to die like flies, but perhaps that's been
fixed.

I'm still afraid to put anything I care about on Maxtor.

> If you plan on using 10K Seagate drives for such tasks, you'd better set
> them to Performance Mode (just a mouse click in Seatools Enterprise)...

Hopefully that doesn't turn on write cache.

> cardinally different performance in various applications. That is physical
> properties become less important for HDD leadership than the expertise of
> programmers, who code and optimize firmware versions."

That's old news. Firmware and controller logic have been important for a long,
long time, and has been a traditional advantage of SCSI over IDE.

Also, it is only true to a point.  You can't make a slow drive fast no
matter how good your firmware is.

You can only make a fast drive slow if you screw the firmware up.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]