Once upon a time, I loved SCSI.

[Andrew W. Gaunt]

Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:

>So, anyway, I'm a SATA guy, now.  One channel -- one drive.  No ID's to
>set, no terminators to worry about, hot-swappable... and there are some
>really fast, high-MTBF drives out there for those who want to compete with
>SCSI.  As to reliability, there are some plenty good RAID solutions
>available.  The 3Ware 9500 series *screams*.
>
>$.02, YMMV, yadda-yadda...
>
>-Ken
>
We have had good results with 'PC' servers running various flavors of
redhat and fedora and various flavors of the 3ware RAID controllers;
both parallel IDE and SATA.  The IDE/SATA drives are cheap and
easily replaced. The systems perform well and since they are as a
whole inexpensive, performance issues can be ameliorated by adding
more systems and balancing load across the them.

Several years ago we replaced EMC/Auspex boxes which were much
more expensive. Additionally, the EMC/Auspex boxes were not maintainable
without a support contract (proprietary hardware/software). The support
contract alone cost us more annually than it did to purchase the new
self maintained boxes.  That was several yearsago and we've not
looked back.

-Andrew Gaunt