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Big Dog Joined: 17 Mar 2003 Posts: 3448 Location: KERNOW

I was thinking of upgrading my PC to have a SCSI drive, I've never used SCSI before and was wondering if there is anything I need to know before going for it. Things to avoid, good drives, bad drives etc.

Cheers in advance.

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 7:52 am Post subject:

adaptec for a controller and ibm for a drive are a good combo, we use that a lot at work. ibm still makes good scsi drives, despite their lackluster IDE drives.

mmm... 15000 RPMS...

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 2:41 pm Post subject:

i second the Adaptec controller point... very reliable cards.

you should read up on what ultra160 and ultra320 are... pay attention to the pin configuration on the card and make sure you get drives with the same interface ( 50 or 68 pin).

also... if you ever plan on getting a scsi peripheral (more storage, scanner...) an external scsi port on the card would be a good thing.

as for as drives go... i'm a maxtor man. been using them for for a long time (both ide and scsi) and have zero complaints. oddly enough...i have heard great things about ibm too... and the one time i tried them, one of the drives died after a few months. Other swear by IBM (although... Hitachi now runs that part of the show)... but maxtor has never let me down.

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 2:51 pm Post subject:

Adaptec controller with a Seagate Cheetah in my system. I've been very happy with these companies for many years. Only 1 Seagate drive failed on me. I returned it to Seagate and they sent me a faster drive.

I returned a UW and got a U2W. I have a couple Maxtor drives in my NAS that have been running for years with no complaints. I've tried Tekram SCSI cards and they didn't seem that great. OK, it sucked.
It also helps to write down the address' if you plan on having multiple devices.

Moderator Joined: 26 May 2001 Posts: 8155 Location: Borneo

Get an opteron with SATA and loads of ram

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 5:59 pm Post subject:

ehhh... while sata certainly has it's points... it still doesn't touch scsi.

it's amusing that this topic popped up today. Just last night i was researching a little about sata and was comparing it to scsi (is sata what i want in my next box?). After reading around i came to the conclusion "no".

the RAID capability and performance of sata appears to above todays ata/133 drives(but not by much) ... and the cost between the two will be relative. But when you take into considersation rotational speeds, burst rates, seek times... scsi blows right by anything ata related.

If you are looking for performance (even "overkill performance") scsi is the way... but of course you get what u pay for (scsi is not cheap)

if you want something a little faster and easier than what you have now... i guess sata would be a good choice... but i don't see the advantage of upgrading from ata to sata just yet.

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 9:02 pm Post subject:

Olive wrote:
(even "overkill performance")

i don't think i'd ever associate overkill performance with harddrives. scsi, sata, ata, whatever, they're all so much slower then anything else in the box (sans optical and floppy drives).

i have yet to use a computer where the harddrive was waiting for it's buffer to be filled because it wrote so fast, or its buffer was waiting to be read before more bits could be put in. more like dma controller waiting and waiting and waiting for the slow slow harddrive (even a good 10000 rpm hd)

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 9:50 pm Post subject:

i'd say scsi is a little overkill for a majority of computing when u look at end usage versus price... if it wasn't... every computer u buy off the shelf would come scsi equiped. if someone can justify dropping the cash for a card and one drive for net, emails, games... mp3's... then cool. even low low end scsi setup could run you $300... for a whopping 18gig HD with 50mb data transfer card. For some.. it would be more cost effective to buy another 100/133 20gig ide drive that spins 7200 for $70.

Not knowing Tom's... or anyones desired end usage... the expense involved may not be worth it.

so yeah... i'd say scsi can be overkill for some

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 9:57 pm Post subject:

I agree with Olive that SCSI can be overkill. I have some SCSI setups(Adaptec controllers, IBM drives). Although I'm very happy with them I must say that from a strict storage viewpoint IDE has more value. The performance of the SCSI drives far outperforms IDE. I'm not talking numbers here, I'm talking real percieved performace... So SCSI can be great.

Another factor that may weigh in is the Nerd Factor. Part of me got the SCSI setup becouse I had no experience in it. Stupid but true.

/Akely

Big Dog Joined: 17 Mar 2003 Posts: 3448 Location: KERNOW

I was just thinking of ways to make my machine run a bit faster, but about a quarter of an hour after posting the message, I checked some prices... Shocked

Are they actually that much faster? or is the difference too small to really notice? Question

At the mo, ive got a Athlon 1.8, 512megs of DDR and two 40 gig drives, one 5400, and one 7200, Maxtor and WD respectively. Running XP, it's just a bit sluggish, if ya kno what I mean?

Posted: Mon May 19, 2003 8:57 am Post subject:

i would say unless you do a lot of multimedia work (audio, video, graphic rendering) or run applications that require many and/or constant reads/write to the disk... SCSI would be overkill. I could never justify spending money on SCSI for ripping mp3's or photoshop work.

i'd read these articles to get a better understanding.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20010129/index.html

http://www.scsi-planet.com/vs/

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020812/

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,79769,00.html

SCSI won't make your machine run faster... but it will speed up the read/write process. Again... if you are read/write intensive... scsi might be worth looking at.

If you just want to speed up your box and maybe save a little money... think about SATA, and/or maybe a processor/memory upgrade.

but.. that's just my 2¢

Big Dog Joined: 17 Mar 2003 Posts: 3448 Location: KERNOW

cheers for the advice, thinking about it, you're right, im better off getting a decent mobo and a better chip.

Cheers

Posted: Mon May 19, 2003 6:42 pm Post subject:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/scsi/index.html