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- Disk drive duty cycles. The reliability of FC and SATA disk drives is measured in very different ways. The failure rates of high-performance FC disk drives are generally benchmarked based upon 24-hour-a-day usage, while availability measurements for SATA drives are generally based on two to four hours of usage a day.
- Disk drive processors. FC disk drives contain two processors -- one to handle the command processing for data access and to set up data transfer, and the other to control the servo mechanism to keep the head aligned with the data to ensure correct and optimal data transfer. SATA drives contain only one processor to handle the servo positioning, command processing and data transfer. Under heavy loads or multiple requests to the same disk for data, performance will be significantly impacted on SATA disks with only one processor to handle the multiple I/O requests.
About the author: Randy Kerns is a senior partner at the Evaluator Group.