[ale] SATA, iSCSI, and ESX

[Greg Freemyer]

I don't think there is anything conceptually wrong with using SATA
drives in a setup like that.

But be warned overall array speed is based on the number of spindles you have.

2 extreme examples:  a single 1 TB SATA drive vs. 24 80GB SATA drives
in a Raid 10 setup.

Both give you roughly 1 TB, but the Raid setup should be approximately
24x faster on read and 12x faster on write.  In addition to be far
safer.

So if the driving factor for Sata is the size of the drives, be aware
you are making a performance trade off.

Greg
On Nov 27, 2007 1:07 AM, Ashley Wilson <awilson at smartfurniture.com> wrote:
> Forgive me if this is an absolutely stupid question... but is it possible to
> get decent performance out of an iSCSI SAN full of SATA disks backing an ESX
> server?  Has SATA advanced enough that it could be a reasonable (if somewhat
> lesser-performing) alternative to SAS or SCSI disks in an iSCSI SAN?  The
> VMs are dev only, but the SAN would have a built-in NAS feature hosting
> users' home folders.  Am I trying to do too much with too little?
> Thanks,
> -Ash
>
>
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