Three tech allies demonstrated a new storage technology that they believe will keep a venerable hard drive standard safe from extinction.
Next-gen SCSI Prototype Shown
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Why not just use firewire?
800mb/s on firewire-2 < 1.5gb/s on SATA and the 3gb/s on SAS.
What an apple fan.
SCSI = Santa Cruz Systems Interface. I’d switch to firewire ASAP.
LOL! Nice one, Jason.
But, just in case you were serious, the SC stands for “Small Computer.”
Of course – that won’t necessarily stop SCO from trying to declare it as their own intellectual property… 😉
But, just in case you were serious, the SC stands for “Small Computer.”
So you’re trying to say that “Small Computer Operation” is suing IBM?
SCO in the eyes of the world is the same as USA in the eyes of the Arab. ROBBERS, TERRORIST???
“800mb/s on firewire-2 < 1.5gb/s on SATA and the 3gb/s on SAS.”
Doesn’t really matter because the hard drive is still the bottleneck. Not the interface.
most arabs are very decieved apparently.
following is a quote.
When in England at a fairly large conference this month, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush.
Powell answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.”
It became very quiet in the room.
… that was flame bait but i couldnt resist
I just like the fact of 8m SAS cables… Now I can have my drives on the opposite side of my server room to the actual file servers…
No, it’s the “Small-minded Computer Operation” that is suing IBM, Linux, and the rest of the industrialized world.
So you’re trying to say that “Small Computer Operation” is suing IBM?
Despite the lead-in of puns that could inspire…
(Gee, I just realised that there are a *lot* of derogatory statements that can be made from the initials S and C. Bit of a Cupid Stunt, no?)
Now, I have missed a couple of weeks of news, plus I’ve been tuning out of the SCO nonsense because, well, my brain can only handle a certain amount of manure per subject.
Where on earth has it been said that SCO is suing IBM over SCSI? As far as I was aware, it is an international standard, with SCO’s only involvement being in writing SCSI drivers for their own platform.
I’m not necessarily doubting you – I’m just in a serious case of bewilderment if your statements are true!
Got to be the most unaducated advice here. These guys are certainly not up for home-PC when designing this. Firewire is slow and cable-lenght are limited, for starters…
An external firewire drive is simply a standard ATA drive in a case with a Firewire connection and performs no faster than a standard ATA drive.
For most users SATA is plenty fast enough even for most (non-broadcast) video editing.
SCSI = Small Computer System Interface
SCO = Santa Cruz Operation
SCO doesn’t sue IBM over SCSI, SCO sues IBM over UNIX (or so they claim).
Quite a few of you seem to be a bit confused ATM. 🙂
>Doesn’t really matter because the hard drive is still the bottleneck. Not >the interface.
Ouch… that’s why you put more than one drive in the chain!
awh well they got an appropriate motto anyway
“Who dares, Wins”
Brits and military buffs will get it
Powell answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.”
That’s a nice one. I mean, I almost felt sorry for our loss of life.
But our loss of life was caused by stupidity and a sense of nationalism post 9/11. Our Freedom was never under attack by Afghanistan or Iraq and even our fearless leaders have a hard time proving me wrong, even with their billions of dollars.
I lose more respect for Powell everytime I hear him repeat things like that. This war was never about Freedom and the loss of American lives was our own fault. Nobody owes us land or money for our actions. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest we shot ourselves in the foot, killing 3000 innocent Americans to rally the country for war, and then killed another handful of our soldiers while fighting the wars we wanted to fight. Want proof we knew 9/11 was going to happen and did nothing to stop it? Jeb Bush signed an executive order preparing to declare martial law in the state of Florida on Sep 7, 2001. If that doesn’t mean anything, if we do that sort of thing all that time, then forgive me, my mistake.
Now that we’re done we blame those deaths on protecting our freedom? And the world believes us? That’s the funny thing.
I don’t have any drives that give me more than 40 MB/s transfer rates, and firewire has many advantages, the main one being cost. I can string 3 or 4 drives off each firewire controller and get close to max bandwidth to each drive. Firewire controllers are dirt cheap, around $30 for 50 MB/s bandwidth. I think designing an OS around them and their hot-swappable capability would be most wonderful. From my experience Linux needs a driver rewrite or its SCSI subsystem has to be tweaked slightly, occationally the firewire devices interfere with the CDRW and/or move SCSI controller numbers depending which one loads first, etc. And I still get lock-ups from time to time with bad firewire controllers or old kernels.
Anyway, I would love to see firewire connectors directly integrated into the harddrives. Until that happens I’ve been using swappable IDE enclosures with an IDE <-> firewire converter. Works with about 90% of my disks.
40MB/s transfer rate ideal.
From actually using these devices the absolute fastest I’ve ever gotten is about 32MB/s, which actually comes very close to the 80/20 data/protocol efficiency numbers (pretty impressive actually). Of course the raw drive by itself on an IDE channel gets close to 50MB/s using the same test.
All the new drives basically saturate a firewire channel. After doing some testing I found that even a maxtor fireball 3 (5400) has enough throughput to saturate a firewire bus.
Even though I personally like firewire a lot the advertised capabilities and hot swappability of SATA make it very very attractive and perhaps might put the squeeze on firewire since IMHO it currently sits squarely inbetween USB2 and PATA in usefulness and functionality.
Personally I think serial ATA is gonna be hard to beat. This SAS initiative appears to be a way for companies to try to maintain their very high margin products. Apparently they’re smart enough to realize that SATA pretty much obsoletes SCSI. And no, I’m not an anti SCSI bigot, I just personally hate having to pay 3x as much for hardware that’s maybe only 10-15% faster and is in my experience no more reliable than IDE. Also I don’t see how a raid built with a chain will ever be able to scale like a point to point type raid.
In an ideal world I’d like to see SATA used for fast storage and firewire for peripherals.