Arent ATA drives considered less reliable than SCSI or Fiber drives?
No. With the exception of the motor and the controller card interface, the drives are virtually the same. ATA drives outnumber SCSI and Fiber drives thousands to one and therefore, the manufacturers have a vested interest in maintaining a very high reliability factor with ATA drives. ATA drives generate significantly less heat, have fewer vibration issues, and are used in tens of millions of computer systems, personal video recorders (PVR), most phone systems around the world, medical systems etc. The Seagate and IBM drives Nexsan currently uses have a 600,000-hour MTBF. This means that in a 14 drive configuration one drive could fail every five years. Since RAID systems are redundant, this will not result in data loss and the system would automatically rebuild onto the Hot Spare drive.
