[nycbug-talk] File Backed Disks- Speed Issues

[David Lawson]

>
> Well, erm- I've found the sata systems to be every bit as snappy at
> this scale- (4 drives per 1u box).

There shouldn't be much of a noticeable difference, honestly.  SATA  
bandwidth is 300Mb/s, SCSI is 320Mb/s.  I'm inclined to think that  
any observed difference in performance would be due to controller  
scaling issues or something similar, rather than the actual  
throughput on the devices.  This changes when you compare SATA and  
SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), where there's an order of magnitude  
bandwidth difference between the two.  I just noticed that Dell has  
started selling SAS drives and there appear to be quite a few hitting  
the market lately, I've got a pretty large server order in for boxes  
with them, so we'll see how they do.

--Dave