Quick Serial ATA question
 

Looking at Newegg for a bunch of SATA drives. I'm actually going to put together a SAN using 12 of them in a chassis that does RAID 5 with SATA.

So I am looking and I see SATA II and SATA 150. I know what the 150 is, but I havne't seen SATA II before. Can someone explain the difference?

I going to buy 400 GB drives which they I don't see in SATA II anyway, but I just want to try to learn the difference just so I know for the future.

Thanks!

Have I got my math right here. . . you're building a 3.2 TB RAID 5 SAN?? Jeez. . . that's some serious storage.

This is what I am using as a chassis. I was going to use 16x 250 GB drives, but I decided to go with 12x 400GB drives and then have space left for expansion.

http://www.scsi4me.com/?menu=menu_sp...ena_SA8600.htm

This thread is GeekPorn™

:D

Hilarious. Yes this is true. I'm actually using this as backup storage.

Don't tell me that this is just for your personal use?

No, its for work.

Anyone know the SATA answer?

Sata II drives start at 300mb/s transfer rate. Sata150 is 150mb/s transfer rate.

Over that many drives, I would tell you to consifer RAID 50 or RAID 10 over plain RAID 5.

See link below for explanation.
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_50.html RAID 50 link.
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_10.html RAID 10 link.

Raid 10 I would lose half of my drives, I think the fault tolerance in Raid 5 will be enough.

never can be too careful...(put your tinfoil hat back on)

I would of course make due with a backup server like that....

sorry about the drool...

well if you have that many drives the chance that 2 will die close to gether is prety high. good luck with it though.

It will have three different arrays going though, so I still will have some good fault tolerance.

Just remember that RAID 5 is to protect against mainly 1 drive failing at any given time, for the array to just be degraded. I would tell you to break up that many drives into severaly RAID 5 arrays. Don't put that many drives to a single RAID 5 array. You would be asking for trouble.

Also, remember to have a hot spare or two available incase something happens, you can easily implement it.

As always, tape backup is still a good idea to do nightly.
I'm just giving suggestions. We have a Sun StorEdge 6130 Array that I maintain among other things. It scales from 5 to 112 drives (365GB to 41.2TB). I just don't want you to think I'm just throwing you suggestions and not know what I'm talking about.

Well I was going to make 3 Raid 5 arrays, 4 drives each. I'll have room to add one more array of another 4 drives if I need to add space later.

Sounds good then.