FATA vs. FC disk drives

BROWSE BY TAG Storage Networking: SAN/NAS,   Primary Storage or Storage Hardware,   RAID,   SAN (storage area network),   Fibre Channel (FC) SAN,   Disk drives,   Disk Hardware FAQ,   Related information,   VIEW ALL TAGS

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

RELATED CONTENT Storage Networking: SAN/NAS Upgrading operating systems for two fabrics Data centers and synchronous replication Network File Sharing vs. Common Internet File System Use of RAID with multiple drives How to add more channels to a network Achieving secure data storage for shared read/write I/O operation SAN server accommodation Offsite vs. onsite storage SATA on a Dell Dimension 4400 FCID on two separate fabrics RAID Pivot3 and Seanodes increase performance, scalability of iSCSI storage products Fujitsu adds DX60 and DX80 midrange disk arrays to Eternus line Storage Decisions Chicago 2009 Session Downloads MAID technology remains underutilized The state of MAID in data centers MAID product roundup The evolution of RAID data protection RAID changes its stripes, but not its value Post-RAID products Faster disk drive rebuilds: Hot Spots RAID Research Disk drives Enterprise data storage technologies rise from the dead Fail-in-place systems: Avoiding hard disk drive failures Dataram enters solid-state storage market with XcelaSAN Pliant claims up to 180,000 IOPS per drive with new Lightning Enterprise Flash Drive Low-cost MLC NAND flash gains in enterprise solid-state storage Solid-state storage update STEC Inc. CTO looks at the future of flash and solid-state drives STEC ships enterprise-ready MLC solid-state drives, but acknowledges tradeoffs Dell, Samsung ship encrypted solid-state drives (SSDs) on corporate laptops Best practices for solid-state drive storage technology Disk drives Research

RELATED GLOSSARY TERMS Terms from Whatis.com − the technology online dictionary disk cache  (SearchStorage.com) disk duplexing  (SearchStorage.com) disk striping  (SearchStorage.com) double-parity RAID  (SearchStorage.com) hard disk  (SearchStorage.com) hard disk drive  (SearchStorage.com) parity  (SearchStorage.com) RAID  (SearchStorage.com) storage medium  (SearchStorage.com)

RELATED RESOURCES 2020software.com, trial software downloads for accounting software, ERP software, CRM software and business software systems Search Bitpipe.com for the latest white papers and business webcasts Whatis.com, the online computer dictionary

If you can afford the FC disk drives and your applications can benefit from the lower latency, you could go that route. However, performance aside and assuming that your environment and applications will be fine today and in the future with the FATA disk drives, that is a viable option. FATA is essentially FC attached disk drive with dual porting similar to a regular FC disk drive. The big difference is in the price and lower performance -- putting FATA on par as an alterative to Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drives offered by other vendors. HP and other vendors including EMC (DMX and new CLARiiON CX3) and Xiotech also utilize FATA type disk drives under different marketing names in addition, or instead of, SATA disk drives.

For update and write-intensive applications go with RAID-1 vs. RAID-5, granted you will consume more raw capacity, however you will still have plenty of capacity from the looks of it. So, assuming that performance will be OK, and that HP agrees to support your needs and provide remedies such as substituting faster disk drives if necessary, using FATA gives you the benefit of saving on power, cooling and enclosure rack space -- not to mention some additional capacity.

In general, the more you can spread data across multiple disk drive heads is good. However again, look at and assess your applications performance requirements and have the consensus of the supporting vendor before using the larger capacity, slower disk drives. Look beyond cost or savings of the FATA vs. FC disk drives, considering the performance and configuration to support your applications needs including the longer disk drive rebuild time for the larger capacity disk drives now and in the future.

Do you know…

The difference between SATA and FATA?