For about 2 decades now I've had to move away from the reliability of SCSI drives in favor of the cheaper and more available 'IDE' flavors of SATA. But recently have been able to get back to the enhanced reliability of SAS drives due to hardware finally coming into our price range.
We've been using SATA drives in manually initiated 3-way mirroring for several years now, upgrading drives about every 2 years or sooner due to the increased storage needs. We have been using enterprise graded SATA drives from WDC and HGST with 5 years warranties. Out of about a dozen drives, we did have one fail so far.
But a bigger problem is that of bit rot. Most of our files are pdfs of documents scanned at 600dpi full color. On occasion we can't open a file that was probably openable at one point in time. I've done some research on this, sometimes pulling backups of the file from several stored generations of drives (we keep the drives we upgrade from as cold storage) without any evidence of bit rot. But I have also caught one or two.
So my question is that now that we can use SAS drives, do you see any perceivable difference in bit rot on SAS drives vs SATA when used in the same application? I know raid5 as well as smarter file systems can negate and sometimes even prevent the issue from surfacing, but I'm really trying to see if there's a difference at the drive hardware level.
I've always wondered this question (even before we could afford sas), but didn't know who to ask. I know if anyone knows, you guys do! Thank you in advance for any feedback.
We've been using SATA drives in manually initiated 3-way mirroring for several years now, upgrading drives about every 2 years or sooner due to the increased storage needs. We have been using enterprise graded SATA drives from WDC and HGST with 5 years warranties. Out of about a dozen drives, we did have one fail so far.
But a bigger problem is that of bit rot. Most of our files are pdfs of documents scanned at 600dpi full color. On occasion we can't open a file that was probably openable at one point in time. I've done some research on this, sometimes pulling backups of the file from several stored generations of drives (we keep the drives we upgrade from as cold storage) without any evidence of bit rot. But I have also caught one or two.
So my question is that now that we can use SAS drives, do you see any perceivable difference in bit rot on SAS drives vs SATA when used in the same application? I know raid5 as well as smarter file systems can negate and sometimes even prevent the issue from surfacing, but I'm really trying to see if there's a difference at the drive hardware level.
I've always wondered this question (even before we could afford sas), but didn't know who to ask. I know if anyone knows, you guys do! Thank you in advance for any feedback.