Claudio Jeker wrote:
Why should we care about the last few percent of performance on a desktop
PC. Seriously it will be fast enough even for HD porn.
In the end the pathetic seek times of desktop SATA disks will be the most
limiting factor when you hit them with nearly random access patterns.
Because SATA isn't just used in desktop PCs anymore.
Often small servers also use them. Either in a home environment
(file/media server for just a couple of clients) or as a "not so
important / not heavily used" file server in a company, e.g. the server
where all your installation files (and ISOs) are located. In both cases
seek time is not so much an issue, but transfer rates are.
The typical setup, I dare to say, is to have 2 big SATA disks in a RAID1
(+ external backups on USB etc.).
I've also seen a corporate environment where the "live" servers were SAS
and the backup was done onto SATA, which allowed for fast backup times;
from the SATA it went then onto tapes during the day (= again, high
transfer rates were important, not the seek time).
Of course SAS would be better for this, but you can't because it's too
expensive, especially when you need lots of space (1TB+; no pr0n or
warez ;) ).
Yes, I would like to have a SAS RAID5 with 15000rpm disks for my home
server, but it's not gonna happen (any donators?).
I believe a lot of setups would benefit from any improvement in SATA
performance.
regards,
Robert
