[Tfug] A/V drives

[Harry McGregor]

Hi,

You are missing two things.  One, A/V rated drives went out about 5
years ago, with the 120GB range drives.  I don't know of many, if any AV
drives still made.

Secondly, A/V rated drives did not throw out thermal recalibration, the
could delay it slight, hopefully until idle.

This has nothing to do with a 24/7 i/o stream, or broadcast level A/V or
anything to that effect.

It was more of a marketing ploy to get IDE drives in where enterprise
class SCSI was the only option.

Now days SATA drives tend to have rather good performance.  In fact the
enterprise class storage I am support for IBM (anyone in the market for
a SAN?) uses SATA drives, 180 of them to be specific.
http://www.xivstorage.com (oh, and like many enterprise class storage
devices, it's linux to the core)

                 Harry


Bexley Hall wrote:
> Seasoned Greetings!
>
> A/V drives eeked out a bit more performance (actually,
> I suspect it was *determinism* and not raw performance)
> by defering/omitting recalibration activities.
>
> OK, I can understand the value of that.  But, if it can
> be defered/omitted, then why can't *all* drives do this
> (i.e., how do A/V drives achieve thermal stability if
> they don't rely on this?  do they trade data integrity
> for access time?  or, do they count on low duty cycles?)
>
> I'm just trying to wrap my head around the tradeoff
> they are making...
>
> Thx,
> --don
>
>
>       
>
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