SATA or IDE for a fileserver? [Solved]

Elembis · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2003 Posts: 9

I'm building a fileserver with size and cost in mind. I expect it to be used on a 100mbps network interface for at least another year or two. With that in mind, I have couple of questions.

Will an SATA drive be better than an IDE one? I'm choosing right now between mirror models, Seagate's ST3200822A and ST3200822AS.

Even though the drives themselves are the same price, I'm balking over SATA because I'd have to buy a $74 controller to use it. I could almost get an extra 160GB drive for that price. (Yes, I could find a cheaper controller, but this one is more cost-effective when considering that I'd probably follow one SATA purchase with more.)

I've seen some benchmarks indicating the SATA drive has better latency and transfer speeds. If that's true, will it be noticeable from the other end of a 100-megabit connection? (The files being transferred aren't out of the ordinary: music, videos, program and game installers, etc.)

My drives have burst all their seams and are screaming for more space, so I would really like to place an order within the next few days. That is, I can't wait around for other drives/controllers to come on the market.

You have my thanks in advance for answers to any of these questions.

Lip_Gloss_and_Letdown · Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2005 4:31 am Post subject:

Well to be honest i would think that if you go with and SATA configuration on a 10/100 Network the bottlenet would be the network not the harddrives.
With that said i would then go with IDE harddrives. Unless of course you plan on moving to Gigabit in the future witch would of course mean for you got get the SATA drives.

Also i've heard linux sometimes has problems with SATA drives. (can anyone back me up on that?)

falser · Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2005 5:31 am Post subject:

Don't get Seagate SATA drives, they have serious DMA problems for a Linux box. I spent a ton of money finding that out first hand and I'm not the only one:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&q=linux+%2Bseagate+%2Bsata+%2B%22Inappropriate+ioctl%22&btnG=Search.

I have nothing against Seagate - I love my Barracuda IV - but their SATA drives aren't quite there yet. At least consider another brand.

nic01 · Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2005 11:03 am Post subject:

I don't think SATA is woth it. The speed difference isn't that great (if there is any), depends on the disks anyway. Had problems with Segate SATA disks myself, but Maxtor seems to do alright (Sil3112 controller). A 100MBit interface can 'only' transfer around 12MB/s max, so a proper IDE 50MB/s would be more than enough.

/Nic

rasmussen

racoontje · Veteran Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Posts: 1290

I'd go for SATA, the main problem being that it might clog up your PCI bus. However it's possible that your normal IDE controller is on the PCI bus too, so it doesn't matter anyway.

Elembis · n00b Joined: 10 Jun 2003 Posts: 9

That settles it. I'd much rather stick with Seagate, since their drive has phenominal reviews on Newegg (75 total. and nothing below four stars), and the equivalent Western Digital and Maxtor drives don't have that kind of feedback. A friend of mine just had a 200GB drive fail, and reliability was already a big concern of mine. Also, I don't have time to mess with buggy hardware, which the SATA drive and the Promise controller seem to be (on Linux), so SATA is out of the picture.

I appreciate the timely responses. IDE it is.