[Beowulf] SATA vs SCSI drives

[H.Vidal, Jr.]

Hello all.

We are building some Network Area Storage gear around some high-end
imaging and data acq. systems. Reliability for storage of this data is
a big time must.

To date, we have built all of this lab's gear around SCSI drives because it
has been our research and experience that SCSI drives are better built
than IDE drives. However, when looking at these drive arrays and NAS
appliances, it is very clear that SATA drives are really driving large scale
storage.

What has been the general experience on this list of SATA vs SCSI in terms
of performance, reliability, quoted as well as real-world failure rates, 
etc?
Which SATA drives are considered 'the best' the way, say Seagate drives are
held in high esteem for SCSI?

And, if anybody likes any particular RAID and/or NAS system, let's hear
your stories. About 1.4-1.7 Terabyte raw space.

Thanks for your collective help and attention.

Hernando Vidal, Jr.
Tesseract Technology