I had one server out of service last week, so I need to purchase a new one. After doing some research, I found that there are a lot of lower entry level servers that use SATA rather than SCSI hard driver as the main storage. And any servers that use SCSI HD would cost a couple of thousand dollars depend on how many and how big you want. This caught me thinking again my server selecting strategy because using SCSI HD is always my choice, no only because of the performance but also its reliability.
I know the performance of SATA would meet my expectation for the server but I wasn't sure what makes almost all vendors to use it instead of SCSI HD. Should I go with it and trust its performance and reliability? Serial ATA: opening new markets for ATA RAID - Serial ATA explains pretty clearly why it happens. This is something I should trust and rely on, so I decided and purchased one IBM server with 2 SATA Swap HD (still don't know what this **Swap** means to me).
Also you can check more detail technical information about SATA from the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) website.
[Updated on Oct. 6, 2005]: This white paper also explains more in detail: Serial ATA in Servers and Networked Storage