[SOLVED] Changing out from SCSI to Sata

I am volunteering for a non-profit and they have a Dell server, something like a 2500 series and it has 4 scsi drives and one ide in it now with Win NT4 Server system. There is a scsi drive that is failing on the stripping. I have been asked if I would purchase a 200+ GB drive to replace the current 40 GB Ide drive to get rid of the SCSI drives. My question is would be any great advantage to get a sata controler and pull the scsi out to allow further building with other 200+ GB SATA dirves. They store Data bases that deal with genealogy and they expect to need a lot more space later.
Thanks for your consideration.
Rich

[johnwill]

Hopefully, these folks have backup, right? If not, that's the first thing I'd address!

I'd suggest a pair of 250gig SATA drives and a RAID-0 controller as a replacement, should be able to pick them all up for less than $400.

They have backup in the form of the original cd's that the proggies and databases were installed from.

Thanks

[crazijoe]

Since they have 4 SCSI drives in a RAID array It sound like a RAID 5. The nice thing about a RAID 5 array is if one drive fails, the hot spare will take over and the RAID array will rebuild itself. You will not loose any data.
The reason why so many servers use SCSI drives is because of access and seek speed, while they do not give you the space of an IDE or SATA drive, SCSI drives will out perform them on a network where multiple users will access data on the drives. Another thing is that IDE drives use the CPU for a controller. SCSI and SATA have their own independent controller. What you might look at doing is getting a NAS server to keep you data on. You must understand that redundancy is a big factor if you want to keep a network alive and to not loosing any data. If you do change to SATA drives, do not settle on a single drive. Create RAID 1 (mirroring) or a RAID 5 (striping w/parity) this will give you the best redundancy and keep network from failing.
Remember SATA or IDE drives will have higher latancies that SCSI drives.

Another note,
You might want to invest in a some sort of back-up.(tape drive) Look at a worst case senario. What happens if the office burns down or you server crashes. All that Data is gone.

[johnwill]

Originally Posted by RMadden312

They have backup in the form of the original cd's that the proggies and databases were installed from.

Thanks

That's not a backup! What about all of the data that's been created and updated in those databases???