"Poor" man's NAS

[Steve Jardine]

All,

    Sorry to be a SCSI bigot, but of all the PATA/SATA specs I have looked at the transfer rates all appear to me to be burst rates. In using PATA/SATA drives I believe this to be the case. 

    If I were storing large contiguous files I would want to use a SCSI drive because, IMNSHO, they tend to work better for sustained storage. In example, for multimedia storage where usecs count. 

    Regarding the physical media allow me to tell this story to you. I will keep it short. Some time ago I worked for a large company, We performed some heat testing on two drives from Seagate using the same CPU chassis - a Dell Optiplex Gx1. One drive was an Ultra Scsi drive running from a AHA2940, the other an IDE drive running from the internal IDE hardware. Only the drive was put in a heat chamber.

    Each ran random seek/write/read tests from a dos program. At about 60 degrees C the SCSI drive stopped reading back correct data and the writes failed.

    When it was cooled to ambient, the drive was reformatted and worked fine. All read/write/seeks worked as before.

    The IDE drive stopped at about 56 degrees C. When it was cooled to ambient, however, the drive no longer worked. We had the drive electronics swapped out with another working drive and it still did not work. The drive spun up. It sounded like the seeks worked, but the drive never wrote properly again.

    True story..

    By the way - I have 15 year old SCSI-1 drives that still work, and 2 Maxtor 250Gb PATA drives that are less than 2 years old that don't.

    Something to think about...


	Steve