SATA or SCSI raid drives better for FCP?

[Chris Poisson]

Dom,

For what you want to do I think fiber channel would be best.

Have a wonderful day.

[Mrvideo]

A SATA RAID IS cheaper than SCSI and for a good reason. SATA drives are larger capacity for a smaller price per megabyte, You can get 2.0 TB of SATA for about $1200 (drives only) and with SCSI that would cost you closer to $3000.

There is a downside to SATA RAID (of course) when the drives get to about 2/3rds full, the performance drops to one-half the empty capacity performance.

You DO need a Fast dual channel SCSI RAID to do real (uncompressed HD) or FiberChannel RAID

[Bob Vick]

Click on this link or the button on the FCP forum main page. It’s an advertiser on the COW. It has my attention. Anyone with knowledge of this company?

https://www.caldigit.com/

Bob Vick sr promo guy @ ch3 wwmt tv, kalamazoo, mi

[Gary Adcock]

You need to to think about one thing —
SCSI is for all purposes a dying storage solution on the Mac.

Only Atto is currently making OSX compatible SCSI cards for the PCIe machines. while there are al least 5 MFG of SATA cards and at least the same amount, excluding Apple, that make fibre cards.

Leaving SCSI behind in favor of fibre also allows for keeping that noisy array in the next room, adding storage to your setup is easily done with a new unit and a switch or even using shared storage amongst multiple users.

did I say its about the same price?

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows
Chicago, IL

[Dom111]

From what I’ve seen fibre channel drives are pretty costly. Is anyone using SATA raid storage in an HD production environment? Many manufacturers claim that their SATA drives can handle 10 bit uncompressed HD video easily… Are these false claims?

https://www.caldigit.com/ – is 230mb/s fast enough to comfortably handle 10bit uncompressed 1080i HD?

What drives do you HD pros out there use?

Dom.

[Arnie Schlissel]

[gary adcock] “SCSI is for all purposes a dying storage solution on the Mac. “

I’ve been hearing that for something like 15 years. And yet, SCSI is still one of the fastest I/O options available. Only 4Gb fiber currently beats SCSI for bandwidth, although the networking options with fiber are a great selling point.

If you don’t need the networking, I still think SCSI is a viable option. Especially with enclosures that use ATA or SATA drives to build a SCSI RAID, which make it really cost effective.

But that’s just my opinion. YMMV 🙂

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Sean Oneil]

SCSI is dead. SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) just came out. SAS is to SCSI what SATA is to ATA.

[Alan Okey]

Would you care to provide a link to a company producing an SAS adapter that is compatible with Macs? I thought not.

SAS appears great on paper, but it’s off to a very slow start. I’m hearing from a lot of industry people that it’s a shrinking market. Even at the enterprise level, IT people are favoring SATA for nearline storage due to its price-per-GB ratio.

In RAID situations, it’s becoming even more of a wash. SATA drives are so cheap that it’s affordable to have plenty of hot spares lying around to offset the lower MTBF ratings. All of the big storage vendors are now offering SATA-to-Fibre RAIDs to meet customer demand. I just spoke with a rep from Rorke Data the other day and he said that the majority of their business is now SATA-to-Fibre. He said that just a few years ago it was mostly SCSI and Fibre Channel, but now it’s cost, not ultimate performance, that is the driving factor for the majority of their customers.

I personally would prefer a Fibre RAID with Fibre drives for my editing system, but considering the vast disparity in storage capacity at the same price point between Fibre and SATA, it just doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. I could buy a SATA-to-Fibre RAID and an entire replacement set of hot spares for much less than the cost of a similarly sized Fibre-to-Fibre array.

There are certainly applications for which SCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS are the most appropriate choice. Online storage for servers is a good example, where the drives get hammered with multiple I/O requests simultaneously. The SCSI protocol handles multiple I/O requests much better than SATA, and the availability of 15K rpm drives helps further by cutting seek times and increasing throughput speed. I think video editing, however, is no longer one of those applications that requires SCSI. For many people, the slightly slower performance of SATA in video applications is offset by the huge difference in the price of storage capacity. And while the MTBF ratings are still lower for SATA drives, some manufacturers are now offering a 5-year warranty for SATA drives, the same as their SCSI drives.

What it really comes down to is how much money you have to spend, and how important overall storage capacity is to your work. If you’re editing HD, you’ll need a lot of fast space. If you’re editing DV, you’ll just need space, with speed not being as critical. If you’re primarily doing HD compositing or short-form HD editing, then speed is more important than capacity.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Is having SCSI or Fibre Channel drives in your RAID worth paying double, triple or even 12x the cost of using SATA drives? Will you feel more secure about your data? Are bragging rights worth the extra cash?

Here’s a little eye opener… (prices from Provantage.com)

ST3160812AS Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB 8MB SATA II/3Gb: $65.79

ST3146707LC Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 146GB 8MB U320 SCSI 80Pin: $379.97

ST3146854LC Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 146GB 8MB U320 SCSI 80-Pin: $765.18

ST3146854SS Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 146GB 8MB SAS 3Gb/s: $832.79

In summary, for similar capacity, you could buy 5, 11 or 12 Barracuda SATA drives for the cost of one Cheetah 10K SCSI, 15K SCSI or 15K SAS drive, respectively.

Let’s extrapolate that. Let’s say you want to build a 10-drive RAID. For the drives alone, the prices would be:

1.60TB SATA… $658
1.46TB 10K SCSI… $3780
1.46TB 15K SCSI… $7650
1.46TB 15K SAS… $8330

Cha-ching!

Good luck in your quest.

[Sean Oneil]

Here’s the link you requested:
https://attotech.com/press/presssassata.html

It doesn’t say Mac support in the article, but being from Atto it most certainly will. Anyways, I don’t care about SAS either unless it gets a lot cheaper. I agree with you, SATA is the way to go. I was just pointing out the existence of SAS to highlight the fact that legacy SCSI is truly dead.

[Alan Okey]

I have to admit, it’s pretty sweet that SAS and SATA share the same interface. You can mix and match SAS and SATA drives on the same cotroller, which is a great feature.