Choose SCSI over SATA for enterprise servers

Administrators are must choose between a newer, more exciting technology or an existing, proven one. When it comes to servers, many admins now face the choice of going with the new serial ATA (SATA) hard drive and the existing SCSI standard.

Its lower cost and new features make SATA attractive, but SCSI continues to be the gold standard for server hardware for a reason.

SATA is a new version of the ATA/Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) drive standard used for years in desktop hard drives and removable drives such as CD/DVD drives. ATA drives have always been inexpensive and easy to work with, but they have lagged behind SCSI drives in terms of performance. SATA goes a long way toward closing that gap.

SATA: The good news

However, there are downsides to SATA -- or upsides to SCSI drives.

In short, SATA is best for simple, single-disk servers and desktop and workstation configurations that can benefit from disk-striping setups, such as multimedia editing stations. At this point, it's really not suited for use in enterprise-class servers.

SCSI is the best choice for high availability and durability rather than performance per se. The performance is definitely there; it's just that SCSI is engineered more to be fault

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-tolerant.

Spend your money on SCSI and rest easy. SATA does make an appealing alternative to low-end (i.e., desktop) SCSI setups, which have been more or less eclipsed by ATA/IDE as a whole for some time now and should flourish nicely there.

Serial ATA (SATA) is a drive interface designed to replace the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. The storage world has been buzzing about SATA drives for years, debating how it stacks up against other technologies.

Users of the SATA interface are benefiting from greater speed, simpler upgradeable storage devices and easier configuration. While SATA drives don't match the performance of Fibre Channel (FC) hard drives, they provide the low cost per gigabyte and high storage densities crucial for "near-line" storage tasks such as performing backups and archiving.

This Fast Guide is a compilation of SATA-related tips that have appeared on SearchWinComputing.com. As our site devotes more coverage to SATA, expect to see more tips related to upgrades and configuration.