Hitachi SATA II

[tharding]

Is this going to be a vast improvement?

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/hgst/?epi_menuItemID=4353e2f06c3b95938797c532aac4f0a0&epi_menuID=8d237906f078b6fd25ad4e8060e4f0a0&epi_baseMenuID=22f0deefa8f3967dafa0466460e4f0a0

Cheers

Toby

[samsc]

not this drive.

its got a dreadful seek time - 8.5 ms. and its only 7200rpm.
scsi is 3.5 ms seek time.

it makes not the sligthest difference that its 'sata II', our application is seek/rotational latency time limited not data rate limited.

What does help is a good raid controller-
2 normal ata drives on a xserve raid gives very good performance, because the raid controller is very good

For an indication of which single drives work well:
choose the "SR File Server Benchmark 2002" menu option at:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php


the reason why you choose 'file server benchmarks' is that this application is dependant on the number of transactions per second a drive can do. Not the data transfer rate.