SCSI vs ATA->FC vs SATA discussion

Well, Clay, it looks like the luck of the draw was against you. I've had two Medea 160 RT units for 3 years and two more Medea 160 RT units for 18 months now, without a single failure.

I know that Medea tech support is good, so if you're the kind of guy that's very reliant on tech support, ignore the next paragraph:

naz (on Cinewave cow) stated that he had installed bigger IDE drives into Medea RT arrays, which made them faster and also much bigger than they were new.

Bottom line: I feel there's a very limited life left for overpriced SCSI arrays or JBODS. SCSI drives were and still are targeted at enterprise storage, where big companies have huge budgets for hardware. I don't see myself in that category, why should I pay a premium for SCSI drives over IDE arrays?

Hoo boy, is the hard disk landscape going to change: Serial ATA is also coming out to play. Western digital is going to try to break the server SCSI stranglehold by selling their new SATA drives at 10 000 RPM and a higher price tag, while the other bigger SATA drives almost all come out with 8mb cache. SATA is going to be an easy way to build arrays similar to Medea RTS/RTX, Huge and Apple Xserve RAID.

I've been itching to buy a new bigger array, but guess what: I can hold out for a few more months. Hopefully we'll have options for using SAN software with Xserve Raid by then...