IDE vs. SCSI reliability

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Googer, you're beginning to border on trolling. If you're going to go through the effort of quoting me and trying to disprove something I posted, at least learn to read first.

Also, it's industry standard that drives have a 5 year service life, both ATA and SCSI, so saying you're taking a week off an ATA drive's life by running it a week is rather stupid. Unless you plan on using that drive beyond 5 years, you're not risking anything leaving it running the whole time. They're all designed to work for 5 years within the stated failure guidelines, and then all bets are off.

And as Cerb stated above, our original recommendations were based on the fact, that Sickbeast made it sound like he was scraping pennies together for a budget, and without the knowledge of how much the data he was trying to protect was worth. Those 2 points are of paramount importance when recommending the most approriate solution.

I did read all the posts in this thread, sorry if i missed one since i have some dislexia.

Yes ATA and SCSI have 5 year warrenties but there are some technical differances:
ATA drives have a 20% duity cycle for I think it was hitachi or seagate. although some drives are rated up to 30% duity cycle, It is nothing compaired to every scsi hdd's 100% duity cycle. meaning scsi was designed to operate contiunously for 5 years with out ever getting a break or being powered off. ATA drives were designed to last 5 years under the condition that they were only powered on 30% of the time and that is true for most users of ATA/IDE. That is why so many 10 year old IDE drives are still in use to day, becuase they were not used every day.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Googer, you're beginning to border on trolling.

What do you mean by that?if I offended you, I aplollogize.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Pariah
I wouldn't even bother with RAID 1 for the internal drive, so long as you run daily backups to the external drive.

The problem is, say the drive dies near the end of a workday. The firm would lose the work of 13 people for 7 hours. That's around $1800 in lost productivity (using a conservative salary estimate). They seem to be extremely paranoid about backups in the office.

Oh man, what are you complaining about? To much redundancy > less redundancy. Especially when you're the admin and they come to your house with pitch forks and torches when the server comes down. At least you aren't dealing with a bunch of retards in management that don't understand the very real need for redundancy and backups.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Cerb
If it's not doing a lot of random access (mail server, DB work), just stick a couple of big 'Cudas in RAID 1.
IDEs will die, but if you've got hardware RAID, all should be well. Or get an external HD. If you go external, see about a decently-priced manufacturer external. It could save a lot of headaches vs. getting drives and then enclosures.

13 people COULD bring a IDE drive to its knees if that IDE drive is home to a currently active database. Even light DB work can really tax IDE drives (not counting new Raptors as "IDE", BTW). However, if it is a file/print server, the drives will hardly be used at all.

In general, IDE drives fail more often. Hardware RAID, however (don't even think about software RAID in Windows...it works, but is a PITA when things mess up compared to a $150-$300 controller card). With RAID 1, you'd need the filesystem to sh!t itself to cause major damage, or soemthing like a PSU blowing, etc., any of which can generally be avoided with vigilance, good OEM boxes, or good parts built from scratch.

Two ATA drives will be far more reliable than one SCSI, because one SCSI might still fail. The whole point is to remove as many single points of failure as possible.

If the RAID is successful, even if you get a cheaper card without hot swapping, everything should be smooth on failing. If the server has be brought down for the new drive installation, it's not a big deal when it means no one can access it for half an hour, as long as no data was lost .

Yep. To me, IDE raid was a GODSEND. SCSI raid is just plain out of the reach of the small nonprofit I work for...but at the same time everyone puts loads of mission critical data on the file server that they would be FVCKED without. Sure we have backups on tape...but how long do those take to restore, and tapes themselves aren't 100% reliable. IDE raid is the poor mans drive redundancy. It may not be super fast, but forced to choose between speed and redundancy on a server I will choose redundancy every single time.

 

[Sunner]

Googer, have you ever worked for a small company?
Budgets can drain real fast when they're small to begin with and no reserves exist, in cases like those you have to look to price/performance no matter what you would prefer to do.
I buy plenty of (relatively) cheap hardware where I would personally prefer to buy better hardware, but with our restricted budgets I can't just buy a $15.000 server when a $2.500 server is "good enough".

That said, since SickBeast mentioned that the data was worth $200K/week, a proper server with all SCSI and a good backup(tape) sounds like a good idea.
Of course, without some kind of concrete budget, it becomes much harder.

 

[desy]

Now that its all sorted out
Mirror your 18 gig drives, good idea
Add your 72 gig scsi drive 10K for $365 CDN at Tiger direct, you don't need 15K you said it was for archival purposes. Work out your backup solution, even a tape drive will be pretty expensive once in and with a rotation of tapes. What was the quote from the ISP for offsite? combine that with maybe your USB IDE drive ext your probably good.
If you ever gone through the ITIL process, availablity and continuity aren't something to sluff off.
Its a real cost from the buisiness point of view and easily eclipses HW in the bottom line.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: desy
Now that its all sorted out
Mirror your 18 gig drives, good idea
Add your 72 gig scsi drive 10K for $365 CDN at Tiger direct, you don't need 15K you said it was for archival purposes. Work out your backup solution, even a tape drive will be pretty expensive once in and with a rotation of tapes. What was the quote from the ISP for offsite? combine that with maybe your USB IDE drive ext your probably good.
If you ever gone through the ITIL process, availablity and continuity aren't something to sluff off.
Its a real cost from the buisiness point of view and easily eclipses HW in the bottom line.

Tiger Direct is loacted in Florida, he would be better off buying from newegg or another company and saving $100. He wants to buy from a Canadian Company so he wont have to pay duities and tarriffs. I never buy from TCWO or Tiger Direct because I have to pay sales tax and shipping.

 

[desy]

There is a Canadian tiger Direct just drop a ca on the end instead of a .com

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: desy
There is a Canadian tiger Direct just drop a ca on the end instead of a .com

I did not realize there was a canadian brach of that company. However Since newegg and others are signifigantly cheaper on almost every thing and give free shipping on most items, I would add up all of the costs including duities and tarrifs and It still might be cheaper to buy from a US company than from tiger Direct.

 

[Googer]

Here is the newegg price

Fujuitsu Drive from Compuvest, $175, OEM <---- It is refurbished, so it is not worth buying for buisness. Factory Reject.


I found the same hard drive for $152.00 from a company in California. I would be cheaper to buy from them and pay all of the Canadian import fees, than it would to buy from Tiger Direct in Canada.

I am waiting on an email response from the company with the drive for $152.00, I will let you know more later.

 

[desy]

Ok lets do the math Its basically the 50% rule, whatever you buy in the states add 50% to it for shipping handling duties brokerage, etc.
Proven over time and again its why CDN's don't mail order everything from the US
I quoted a Maxtor 10 K drive for 365 there are others that cost that too but lets just pick one.
He will pay $400 to buy local from Tiger or something competative so he'd have to get that Maxtor drive from Newegg for $265 roughly, seems they go from 221 to 325 for that type of drive from fuji to seagate.
Then if your in a hurry for it. it does take some time to clear customs as well.

Then should you have warranty issues its always so much more painful moving parts back and forth you have to fill out declaration papers and so forth on all computer equipment, resultant of the whole homeland security schlemele from 9/11
It ususally doesn't justify in the end to save $50

I've bought stuff from the States but only if I can't find a Canadian source or its an Ebay find or something

 

[Googer]

Thanks for Filling in on area I am not too familiar with: Canada.

 

[Vegito]

Yes ATA and SCSI have 5 year warrenties but there are some technical differances:
ATA drives have a 20% duity cycle for I think it was hitachi or seagate. although some drives are rated up to 30% duity cycle, It is nothing compaired to every scsi hdd's 100% duity cycle. meaning scsi was designed to operate contiunously for 5 years with out ever getting a break or being powered off. ATA drives were designed to last 5 years under the condition that they were only powered on 30% of the time and that is true for most users of ATA/IDE. That is why so many 10 year old IDE drives are still in use to day, becuase they were not used every day.

That is true, I remember when IBM publish their IDE/ATA drive data with 20% duty cycle, pretty much everyone here stop buying IBM deathstars

 

[fixxxer0]

googer and sickbeast pleast get a room lol

this is like your private sex thread the two of u take up 90% of the pages

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Googer
I still don't get why such worry over a savings of $300 to protect data worth $10,400,000 (10.4 million) per year or 200,000 a week. At 200,000 a week the $1,000 cost is less than one half of one percent of 200k. Considering that these drives will be in use for 5 years the cost will amount to about $3.85 per week or .32¢ per user per week (12 users). SCSI is a cheap insurance policy to protect data that valuble.

IF this is really the job of your dreams and you would like a long and properous carrer then I would not trust this data to anything else. Protect your self as well as the data, It aint worth saving a few cents. Your boss and your clients will appreciate it.

My co-workers seem to like the sound of 250GB in RAID-1 as opposed to a single 74GB SCSI drive. I'll run down a proposal for two 74GB SCSIs in RAID-1 but honestly it's overkill IMO.

By the way, does anyone know if a RAID controller is needed for SCSI drives? A guy at a computer store started saying he was "MSCE certified" and "had been doing IT for 20 years" when I disputed the fact that I require a RAID controller. I know it works for IDE; it must also work for SCSI does it not?

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Googer
I still don't get why such worry over a savings of $300 to protect data worth $10,400,000 (10.4 million) per year or 200,000 a week. At 200,000 a week the $1,000 cost is less than one half of one percent of 200k. Considering that these drives will be in use for 5 years the cost will amount to about $3.85 per week or .32¢ per user per week (12 users). SCSI is a cheap insurance policy to protect data that valuble.

IF this is really the job of your dreams and you would like a long and properous carrer then I would not trust this data to anything else. Protect your self as well as the data, It aint worth saving a few cents. Your boss and your clients will appreciate it.

My co-workers seem to like the sound of 250GB in RAID-1 as opposed to a single 74GB SCSI drive. I'll run down a proposal for two 74GB SCSIs in RAID-1 but honestly it's overkill IMO.

By the way, does anyone know if a RAID controller is needed for SCSI drives? A guy at a computer store started saying he was "MSCE certified" and "had been doing IT for 20 years" when I disputed the fact that I require a RAID controller. I know it works for IDE; it must also work for SCSI does it not?

Software RAID should work fine, RAID controllers are just handy. Kind of like how could build a ABC AV switch, or buy a $200 AV hub. Even assuming the sound quality is the same between them both, the hub part built to do the job makes a for a faster, smoother experience when changing things.

Either way is fine. A special controller is not needed (minimal, if any, difference for RAID 1), but it probably won't be wasted money, either.

 

[desy]

you can have just a scsi card - no HW raid just like you can have IDE no raid , cept SCSI cards support up to 14 devices + the controller 'considered a device' or is 15 + the controller, hmmm?
I wasn't going to mention SW raid cause the overhead makes it kinda useless, HW raid is the way to go.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: desy
you can have just a scsi card - no HW raid just like you can have IDE no raid , cept SCSI cards support up to 14 devices + the controller 'considered a device' or is 15 + the controller, hmmm?
I wasn't going to mention SW raid cause the overhead makes it kinda useless, HW raid is the way to go.

I'm using SW raid (dual SCSI drives) in a P3 933 running Exchange, about five networked printers, private folders, and WinNT PDC duties for about 80 users. As I mentioned before, typical CPU usage in business operation is ~5%. So SW RAID, at least with SCSI, is not necessarily "useless" due to overhead, unless maybe you're running a VIA C3 for a CPU or something Granted, with a retail-boxed LSI Logic 21320R going for around $240 at Newegg, simple hardware mirroring is not that much of a stretch.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: desy
you can have just a scsi card - no HW raid just like you can have IDE no raid , cept SCSI cards support up to 14 devices + the controller 'considered a device' or is 15 + the controller, hmmm?
I wasn't going to mention SW raid cause the overhead makes it kinda useless, HW raid is the way to go.

I'm using SW raid (dual SCSI drives) in a P3 933 running Exchange, about five networked printers, private folders, and WinNT PDC duties for about 80 users. As I mentioned before, typical CPU usage in business operation is ~5%. So SW RAID, at least with SCSI, is not necessarily "useless" due to overhead, unless maybe you're running a VIA C3 for a CPU or something Granted, with a retail-boxed LSI Logic 21320R going for around $240 at Newegg, simple hardware mirroring is not that much of a stretch.

Yep, I knew you mentionned this before, mechBon, which is why I was so concerned about what the guy at the computer store was telling me. My work told me to call them; the store is just up the street. The thing was, the guy was rude and he wanted to charge me $259 for a 250GB IDE drive :Q. All I wanted was a price quote. I asked for a quote on a SCSI drive and he tried to sell me a $500 RAID card. I menionned SW RAID and he flipped and basically said that I don't know what I'm doing and he does.

For his arrogance and ignorance he's losing over $2,000 in business. I'm going to drop by my usual shop. Service > convenient location when it comes to computer shops IME.

Thanks again for your 1337ness, mechBgon.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Cerb

Originally posted by: SickBeast
By the way, does anyone know if a RAID controller is needed for SCSI drives? A guy at a computer store started saying he was "MSCE certified" and "had been doing IT for 20 years" when I disputed the fact that I require a RAID controller. I know it works for IDE; it must also work for SCSI does it not?

Software RAID should work fine, RAID controllers are just handy. Kind of like how could build a ABC AV switch, or buy a $200 AV hub. Even assuming the sound quality is the same between them both, the hub part built to do the job makes a for a faster, smoother experience when changing things.

Either way is fine. A special controller is not needed (minimal, if any, difference for RAID 1), but it probably won't be wasted money, either.

Thanks. I do see mechBgon's logic though. If your RAID card burns up and is no longer manufactured, you can kiss your data goodbye unless you want a massive headache searching for a workaround. Not only that, but look at his CPU overhead; it's next to nothing on SCSI! Even on IDE I can't see it being overly significant. The server doesn't seem to require the full power of its P3 processor, even under peak usage (it never spikes above 5% from what I've seen).

Anyone know anything about cracking open a Compaq server case? Any surprises generally?

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: desy
There is a Canadian tiger Direct just drop a ca on the end instead of a .com

I've heard terrible things about that store. IME Toronto computer shops near College/Spadina are unbeatable by anything offered on the web. As I said, I need something local.

If anyone knows of a SCSI specialty shop, or a high-end computer store in Toronto that has a price list on these drives, please let me know.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: desy
Now that its all sorted out
Mirror your 18 gig drives, good idea
Add your 72 gig scsi drive 10K for $365 CDN at Tiger direct, you don't need 15K you said it was for archival purposes. Work out your backup solution, even a tape drive will be pretty expensive once in and with a rotation of tapes. What was the quote from the ISP for offsite? combine that with maybe your USB IDE drive ext your probably good.
If you ever gone through the ITIL process, availablity and continuity aren't something to sluff off.
Its a real cost from the buisiness point of view and easily eclipses HW in the bottom line.

Would you go with a single 74GB SCSI, or two IDE 250GB drives in RAID-1? Performance is not an issue, reliability only.

We have a 20GB tape backup system. It's a PITA and I was hoping to only use it on the 18GB RAID-1 of critical data. We have 36GB of data in total right now (both hard drives are 99% full). RAID-1 is a backup in itself in some ways. The USB drive is the second backup. Remote off-site storage is the third. I don't think we need anything more than that. An optical backup onto DVD-R every month wouldn't hurt.

 

[JediJeb]

Just a comment, I have read through this and can appreciate both sides of the IDE vs SCSI argument. I know that big servers work best with SCSI, and some companies can afford it. And even though the data my company produces is worth quite abit, we are also running on a budget where it costs almost as much to produce the data as it is worth, and for me to even ask for a $80 IDE drive takes 4 meetings, 3 justifications and a note from my mother saying I am not just wanting to waste money. I have even had to try to explain why we cant upgrade our P75 computers to XP :roll: I would kill for a server which had an IDE Raid 1 for more data security. We prodce over a Gig of data a week which we have to keep for 5 years. Right now I am putting it on CD's because that is the cheapest way to do it. I burn about 200 CDs per year ( 50 to 60 Gb in duplicate for off site and on site)

I can understand SickBeast's reason for asking the question, sometimes we are in a really difficult place when deciding what to do. I definately respect what Googer has to say about the reliability of SCSI, but I also think that Cerb is with me on understanding that sometimes you just gotta make a less than optimal situation work for the best. Hope we can all learn to understand where each is comming from

Now gotta go post my question of a similar nature lol.

 

[mechBgon]

JediJeb, you gotta hold a bake sale or something

 

[Kilrsat]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: desy
Now that its all sorted out
Mirror your 18 gig drives, good idea
Add your 72 gig scsi drive 10K for $365 CDN at Tiger direct, you don't need 15K you said it was for archival purposes. Work out your backup solution, even a tape drive will be pretty expensive once in and with a rotation of tapes. What was the quote from the ISP for offsite? combine that with maybe your USB IDE drive ext your probably good.
If you ever gone through the ITIL process, availablity and continuity aren't something to sluff off.
Its a real cost from the buisiness point of view and easily eclipses HW in the bottom line.

Would you go with a single 74GB SCSI, or two IDE 250GB drives in RAID-1? Performance is not an issue, reliability only.

We have a 20GB tape backup system. It's a PITA and I was hoping to only use it on the 18GB RAID-1 of critical data. We have 36GB of data in total right now (both hard drives are 99% full). RAID-1 is a backup in itself in some ways. The USB drive is the second backup. Remote off-site storage is the third. I don't think we need anything more than that. An optical backup onto DVD-R every month wouldn't hurt.

RAID is not a backup!! This is a very important thing to understand. It is protection against hardware failure, but it is not a backup. A virus gets into one drive, the other is wasted too. A user overwrites the wrong file? That file is gone.

If the data is really worth $200,000/week, I'd look into a real backup solution that can provide a history. One of the most frequent conversations I've had regarding restoring from a backup:
User: "Can you restore file ABC?"
Me: "Sure"
I go and restore the file, fire off an email to the user
User: "Sorry, that copy isn't the one I need."
Me: "Ok, when was the last day you remember using the version you want?"
User: "Oh, it must have been a few months ago"

Now, with RAID that file is gone, with your USB solution that file is most likely gone. DVD-R has capacity limitations and hasn't passed long term reliability, especially with some discs being difficult to read as little as a year later.

A modern LTO, LTO2, or SDLT tape system would be a very nice companion no matter what drive solution you go with. All of these provide at least 100GB (native, double for the "compressed" figures) per tape, and the costs per tape in the $40-$60 range. These are proven technologies that give you more reliability and flexibility in your backup solutions. You can archive nightly, weekly, bi-monthly, etc. and be able to pull up a copy of a file from multiple points in the past. I'll grant that my archive experience is centered around large (2-5TB) data systems, but anything as valuable as that data cannot be trusted to a single backup.

I'd also like to stress the importance to verifying and testing your backups! A backup is no good if it doesn't work or you don't know how to use it. You should also have a disaster recovery plan on file and make sure every IT related person is aware of it. Planning for the "just in case" situation is very important, because if you run into a situation without a plan your emotions are running high, you're thinking on the fly, and you may end up doing more damage. A plan that is thought out in advance, using a clear head, and that passes a peer review may just save your rear.