Solutions  SATA Storage

SATA Storage

Product Categories

 Disk Storage
 Networking
 Servers & Workstations
 Software
 Tape Storage

Click Here for some suggested products right now

Serial ATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or SATA) is a new standard for connecting hard drives into computer systems. As its name implies, SATA is based on serial signaling technology, unlike current IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) hard drives that use parallel signaling.

SATA has several practical advantages over the parallel signaling (also called Parallel ATA or PATA) that has been used in hard drives since the 1980s. SATA cables are more flexible, thinner, and less massive than the ribbon cables required for conventional PATA hard drives. SATA cables can be considerably longer than PATA ribbon cables, allowing the designer more latitude in the physical layout of a system. Because there are fewer conductors (only 7 in SATA as compared with 40 in PATA), crosstalk and electromagnetic interference (EMI) are less likely to be troublesome. The signal voltage is much lower as well (250 mV for SATA as compared with 5 V for PATA).

2006 saw the widespread adoption of 250 GB to 750 GB SATA drives by storage vendors in their products. Nexsan Technologies' VP of Marketing, Brendan Kinkade, attributed SATA's increased adoption rate to significant improvements in quality by drive manufacturers. "Enterprise SATA drives now include five-year warranties, are rated at over one million hours MTBF and share many of the design features and components of their more expensive FC brethren," Kinkade said.

This has resulted in nearly every size organization -- small, medium and large -- using products for specific corporate applications. Email archives (Nexsan Assureon), near-line email repositories (Nexsan SATABoy), virtual tape libraries (Quantum DX Range) and video streaming applications (Nexsan SATABeast) are just some of the ways that users can now deploy storage array products that utilize SATA drives.

Do you want to use SCSI or SATA hard disk drives on your system? Increasingly, the answer is that you want both. The SCSI and SATA interfaces, and the drives built to use them, are different enough that their characteristics can complement each other, providing acceptable performance at a significantly lower total cost.

Of course, that assumes you've chosen the correct mix of SCSI and SATA drives. If you get it wrong, you pay too much for storage or you can't meet your users' needs cost effectively.

For applications demanding high performance, such as critical parts of a DBMS or real-time video editing, SCSI is still the drive of choice. Not only is the interface faster, but SCSI drives tend to be optimized for throughput, while SATA drives are generally optimized for cost.

For jobs needing lots of storage at reasonable cost, such as disk-to-disk backup, SATA has the advantage. However, in a lot of cases you can't simply choose which type of disk based on the application. Different parts of applications can benefit from different kinds of drives.

For example, in Microsoft Exchange, the transaction files are central to performance and need all the speed they can get. However, the message databases are much less critical to overall performance and often they can be run on SATA drives. Since messages use a lot more storage than the transaction log, this can result in substantial savings. Rather than looking at your storage needs by application, it makes more sense to drill down to the mix of needs within each application.

The size of the drives is also a consideration. SATA drives tend to follow the ATA philosophy of "pack everything onto one big drive," with sizes of up to 750 GB. This is fine for desktops and a lot of applications, but for applications needing the fastest access, such as database log files, you want to trade spindles for capacity because it improves performance. The problem is that it's getting harder to get ATA drives in smaller capacities, say 75 GB or less.

With SCSI, on the other hand, you have a lot of choices in the 60-75 GB range; you're a lot more limited if you want anything larger than 300 GB. You may find yourself using SCSI drives simply because they're easier to get in the capacities you want.

The logical question is how much money can you save by doing all this? Unfortunately, that's hard to calculate because the ideal mix of SATA and SCSI is going to vary from enterprise to enterprise. As a first approximation, you can say that SATA drives are cheaper than the more-or-less equivalent SCSI by roughly 50%. ("More or less" because SCSI and SATA drives, even from the same manufacturer, really aren't equivalent, except in capacity.) Besides the disks themselves, other SATA-specific system components, such as arrays, are also generally less expensive than their SCSI counterparts.

Serial ATA (SATA) is a drive interface designed to replace the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. The storage world has been buzzing about SATA drives for years, debating how it stacks up against other technologies.

Users of the SATA interface are benefiting from greater speed, simpler upgradeable storage devices and easier configuration. While SATA drives don't match the performance of Fibre Channel (FC) hard drives, they provide the low cost per gigabyte and high storage densities crucial for "near-line" storage tasks such as performing backups and archiving.

In recent Studies/Surveys, results suggest that around 70-85% of Storage requirements would be adequately fulfilled with SATA Storage.

Contact NexStor today to discuss our wide ranging SATA Storage Offerings.