Should i buy a Fibre Channel or Raptor drive or the latest SCSI drive? MONEY IS NOT my concern, i want the best! Also what will i need?
I notice the raptors are so over priced and not as good as fibre channels and both are pretty close in price per gigabyte. Only dif is the adapter card. im leaning towards fibre channel, so many people fall victim to the raptor just because fibre isnt mainstream in everyday consumer retail stores.
From what I can see, Fibre Channel is a network standard to connect network servers together, not a means of attaching hard drives. Do you mean SAS drives? If there was a benefit to using SAS drives in home PCs, there are enough geeks out there to make use of it. I know of nobody who finds it makes sense to use SAS, mainly due to the cost. You would be surprised how well the new Velociraptor fares against the much more expensive 15k SAS drives.
I've used Fibre Channel in large Sun Unix disk arrays but have not heard of anything Fibre Channel in the realm of PC's..
Fibre channel is an interface type, Raptor is a Western Digital name for a specific line of SATA HDD. It's an apples vs. oranges comparison. Fibre channel is a protocol/interface for transmitting SCSI. Fibre Channel uses an optical interface (copper exists, but is rarely used) that is used primarily in Storage Area networks, although direct attach is sometimes used. "I want the best" is a subjective statement. "Also what will i need?" demonstrates that TC doesn't really understand the technologies involved. In either case you will need an HBA (Hard Drive controller) that matches the interface of the drive. Fibre Channel HBAs can cost anywhere from a couple of hundred to a thousand dollars or more, and this doesn include the cost of the optical cable, drive enclosure (FC typically sits outside the server) and any FC switching components, which can be hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars.
ive seen the host adapter interface cards seeling for as cheap as $200 for the new fibre channel drives.
Now buy the rest of the gear... Trust me, if it was worth buying for a regular PC, I would suggest it.
this isnt an exact drive i want, just an example for you sammorris, http://discountechnology.com/Seagat...leBase&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=product like i said before, alot of people dont know about these drives, thats why im trying to get input as i would rather dish out an extra 200 bux (for the adapter card) for the performance over the raptor.
Or you could use a cheap RAID adapter (or heck, onboard RAID) and get two Raptors in RAID0 - for less cost... It'd beat the MB/s of the 15k drives, but not the access time.
in that case i could just RAID two fibre channel drives, and it would be quicker than the raptors as the fibre drivs can transfer in Gbps vs Raptors Mbps.
The peak transfer rate of a Velociraptor is over 1Gbps actually, and the peak transfer rate of those 15K FC drives is less than 2Gbps. More to the point, the peak transfer rate of an SSD is not far off 2Gbps. You could just get a beefy PCI express S-ATA RAID card and RAID some SSDs together. It would still be less than half the cost of a Fibre Channel RAID setup I'm sure, I don't know why you're so obsessed with this technology.
"ive seen the host adapter interface cards seeling for as cheap as $200 for the new fibre channel drives." And you get what you pay for. I can find used FC HBA for $50.00 but that doesn't mean I'd buy one. And where do you plan to house these drives? HBAs typically don't have internal connectors. Also, FC HDD typically come in much smaller capacities than SATA drives since they are supposed to be RAIDed together. I work in the storage industry. FC is uncommon for consumer users because of the high cost and low (relative) capacity. FC exists because of the need/want to put SCSI on a 2 wire (fibre) interface for distance. Using FC for internal or short haul doesn't justify the expense when you can use SAS instead. Why don't you just use SAS instead? You can mount SAS drives internally.
like the raptors they too come in smaller capacities. But atleast now we are making sense, SAS wouldnt be too bad of a choice, but those can be expensive as well depending on the config. And its not typical, but yes it is possible to set a FC inside a computer system/4U or bigger.
