[K12OSN] SATA drive for server with 25 users?

[Calvin Dodge]

On 10/16/06, Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net> wrote:
> We haven't had any discussion for a while now as to how well SATA drives scale up in a
> K12LTSP server.  It used to be, back in the PATA days, that an ATA (also known as IDE)
> drive would handle up to 10 clients, but going any higher than that resulted in poor
> performance that could be addressed only by going to SCSI with its ability to re-order
> queues and so forth.  But SATA has been out for a while, it now has many of the features
> of SCSI, and I see that 10K RPM versions are available, and so I'm wondering if the
> consensus now is that SATA is good enough for small and even mid-size servers, where by
> 'midsize' I mean roughly 25 clients hanging off of it.  What about 7200RPM SATA drives?

With 25 users it would be worth trying.  FWIW, a local Linux-based
hosting facility (tummy.com) swears by Hitachi drives, and the newer
Hitachis feature "Native Command Queueing", which I believe is
equivalent to the queue reordering you mentioned.

If I was putting together a new server, I'd probably try one of those
Hitachis. They're cheap enough that you could try, say, a 250 gig
model, then relegate it to some other task (like backup storage) if
you found you had to replace it with a SCSI drive.

Yes, you could get a 10K RPM Maxtor drive, but they're much more
expensive, and currently Maxtor reliability is suspect
(http://www.hardwareguys.com/picks/harddisk.html).

Calvin