[TriLUG] SCSI vs. SATA in theory

[Greg Brown]

Do mean time between failure rates between SCSI and SATA differ greatly 
in the field?  Most IDE drives seem to live 3-5 years under moderate 
use and I'm fairly certain that SCSI can go much further then that, but 
what about SATA?  I have to spec out my home server that I want to 
build once the wife's bonus arrives and I'm thinking about drives.  I 
have lots of OLD data that I could probably part with (old laptop files 
from companies I no longer work for, etc) but I don't want to - you 
never know when those five year old Lucent files might come in handy! 
:)

I've been looking towards SATA for the large-volume storage and 
thinking about SCSI for my heavily used partitions (web, database, 
tmp).

Does adding a SCSI drive just for high duty-cycle partitions rally 
matter?  Can I get away with just having everything on one, big SATA 
drive?  I normally only get  one chance over five years to build a 
really nice server, so I want to get this right.

Greg