Aren ATA drives considered less reliable than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives?
A. The ATTO Diamond Array takes advantage of recent advancements in technology that make ATA drives as reliable now as SCSI or Fibre Channel drives. The MTBF ratings for the ATA drives that ATTO currently uses are comparable to SCSI or Fibre Channel drives, with an MTBF of around 800,000 hours. The high-volume demand for ATA disks has driven manufacturers to increase quality, performance and density to levels equal or beyond that available in Fibre Channel and SCSI disk drives. So much has been added to ATA drives that they are nearly identical in composition to SCSI or Fibre Channel drives. In fact, the majority of the internal components are identical across all types of drives with the most notable exceptions being the motor and disk head assemblies. To further increase reliability and availability, ATTO uses several unique patent-pending technologies to ensure full data protection throughout the data path. To guard against data loss, due to mechanical failures of the drives, ATTO u
