storage commentary, serial ATA

The big storage companies want you to buy big, expensive storage.  While I laud their capitalist ambition, they have cranked out quite a bit of FUD over the years.

In meeting after meeting they told us we must have a SAN (Storage Area Network) for databases, for reliability, for whatever.

We listened politely and after extensive research, went instead with a NAS (Network-Attached Storage).

They will also tell you that SCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) drives are "enterprise class", whatever that means.  However, lower-cost Serial ATA drives are now quite close to the specs of SCSI drives from a few years ago.  Network Computing storage blog has some numbers:

Comparing yesterday's "primary storage" with today's Serial ATA