Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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| Disk-drive differences
The number of disk drives, and the different combinations of how to configure them, is growing steadily. What follows are some key differences among Fibre Channel (FC), SAS and SATA disk drives, and why you may want to choose one over the other.
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Interface. SAS and SATA disk drives each support the 3Gb/sec SAS interface speeds, while FC drives currently (or will shortly) support the 4Gb/sec FC interface speed. A key design concern is that disk drives with SAS or SATA interfaces won't plug into FC sockets or vice versa. In addition, SATA disk drives may deliver 1.5Gb/sec or 3Gb/sec speeds, but they're compatible with 3Gb/sec SAS sockets. RAID groups. Controllers don't permit the intermixing of different types of disk drives in the same RAID group. You need to ensure that there are sufficient sockets and the right types of disk drives to create the type of RAID group you want.
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Early struggles and workarounds
Most vendors are candid about their early struggles and equally forthright about what users need to do to correct the situation. Winchester Systems found that within its first generation of products there were some basic issues that caused disk drives to logically drop out of an array group. In an attempt to fix this serious issue, Winchester Systems tried disk drives from different vendors but experienced the same problems. As a result, for some of its customers who had unresolved issues, Winchester Systems replaced their SAS and SATA storage arrays with FC systems.
This was first published in July 2007
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