[K12OSN] SATA drive for server with 25 users?

[Petre Scheie]

We haven't had any discussion for a while now as to how well SATA drives scale up in a 
K12LTSP server.  It used to be, back in the PATA days, that an ATA (also known as IDE) 
drive would handle up to 10 clients, but going any higher than that resulted in poor 
performance that could be addressed only by going to SCSI with its ability to re-order 
queues and so forth.  But SATA has been out for a while, it now has many of the features 
of SCSI, and I see that 10K RPM versions are available, and so I'm wondering if the 
consensus now is that SATA is good enough for small and even mid-size servers, where by 
'midsize' I mean roughly 25 clients hanging off of it.  What about 7200RPM SATA drives? 
Thoughts?

Petre