SCSI was very good for its time and still is in use today which just goes to show its longevity. I have been wondering when they would come out with something to take its place and this should be a nice update. Be interesting to see if the price will come down in time to match SATA or if it will stay at the premium price which has always been the determining factor.

I still have IDE drives in my box... god I feel so old :P

My Amiga is using SCSI drives, and I bet they have been spinning for over 10 years now!

I don't consider this to be a real SAS drive. The performance will never macht, the access times are simply way to high compared to a 10k or 15k sas drive. However it could be a good solution for those archive solutions where you don't allways need that much I/O's.

Ebuyer are punting a SATAII version of the ES.2 drive in 1TB with 32MB of cache for £172 so $300 seems very competitive for such a piece of kit.

why should they not? With SAS and SATA now on the same connector, I would hazzard a guess that there is not THAT much of a difference in the controller board. Wouldn't surprise me if they were, or at least will be soon, making controllers chips that do both SATA and SAS, so the drive maker could use exactly the same board, and (to keep the premium they charge on SAS) just disable SAS on consumer drives.

TBH, I doubt there is any difference in the cost of manufacture, except they will use "better" drives for SAS. Don't really know why they havent merged the two. I would love it to get to a stage where I could run a nice 15K SAS drive (or 6 :D) in my home PC without taking up a valuable expansiopn slot

I always thought one of the reasons that SCSI drives were more expensive was because they are individually tested unlike IDE/SATA drives which are batch tested.

Some SATA drives cost the same as SCSI drives now.

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/(12242)Western-Digital-150GB-Raptor-SATA-10K-rpm.aspx

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/(12407)Fujitsu-147GB-Ultra320-SCSI-hard-disk-drive.aspx

Apologies for my ignorance here.. they state that the MTBF is 1.2 million hours.. According to my calculations, that's about 137 years.

Have they had these things running since 1870 to arrive at that number?

Statistics and Marketing define relaity, you know.

I imagine they run a bunch of drives, count how long it takes a few to blow up, fit it to a curve of harddrive reliability they've reasearched before (or made up) and then extrapolated the failure time from that.

Perhaps they failure test these by having one of the guys I support use the drives for a couple of months... He routinely forgets to shut down his laptop, straps it to the back of his Harley to take it to/from work. He's had several drives/machines fail, and the last one we couldn't warranty as the drive's diagnostics claimed "excessive shock"

High RPM gets you low latency, but it doesn't guarantee high transfer rates. Take a look at the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HDs - at 7200RPM they beat WD raptors at 10k without a problem, all while delivering higher capacity, consuming far less power and making less noise at less cost. They do it by increasing data density on the platter (334Gb/platter), so while the disks are spinning slower, more data is passing the head per second.

@Dr Mouse: "Wouldn't surprise me if they were, or at least will be soon, making controllers chips that do both SATA and SAS"

This is already true. Pretty much all SAS controllers can also accept SATA drives. The reverse is not true. It's nice because you can mix fast SAS drives with big SATA drives. Along with the advent of 15krpm 2.5" SAS drives (cute but expensive), you can now get 1U rack cases (See supermicro) that host 8 hot swap 2.5" drives.

MTBF is a useless indicator for anyone other than "bean counters" estimating warranty costs and has no bearing on "reality". To give you an idea, take two identical drives, label one for home use and label one for server use and the formulas change such that the home one will have an MTBF and the server one 1.2 million MTBF. Simply "changing the sticker" doubles MTBF.