SCSI questions from a n00b

[LiamC]

SCSI n00b question. Please play nice

All this talk over on jsp0's thread, and my X2 upgrade success has gotten me thinking about SCSI. I'm thinking that the next bottleneck may be disc.

So, a 15K boot drive may be in the future. So I did a little looking around, and I see:

68 pin, 80 pin & LVD??? They are connectors I gather--what do I need and are there pros and cons?

Do I need U160 or U320? More is better but it usually costs. Keep in mind that this will probably be the only drive/SCSI device in the system

I'll probably want a 30~40GB drive with three partitions for XP, XP-64 and Linux

Cables, adapters terminators? Go with anything? Gotchas? I suppose I should ask who has good drivers for XP-64 & Linux

What about noise? I have heard conflicting reports about noise? Are all 15K a much of a muchness, or are some better? Do the quiet ones take a performance hit? Should I consider a 10K drive?

SAS?. Is the PCI bus going to be a limitation? There is nothing on the PCI bus at the moment--actually, I think the SiImg SATA controller on the K8NS-Ultra is connected to the PCI bus--I'll check the block diagrams.

As I'm in Aus, who/where should I buy?

What have I missed?

Thanks all

 

[Santilli]

SCSI n00b question. Please play nice

All this talk over on jsp0's thread, and my X2 upgrade success has gotten me thinking about SCSI. I'm thinking that the next bottleneck may be disc.

So, a 15K boot drive may be in the future. So I did a little looking around, and I see:

68 pin, 80 pin & LVD??? They are connectors I gather--what do I need and are there pros and cons?

68 PIN IS THE STANDARD CONNECTOR. SCA, OR 80 PIN, ARE DESIGNED TO BE PLUGGED HOTSWAP INTO AN SCA HOT SWAP BOX. NO POWER CONNECTOR, JUST PLUG THE DRIVE IN THE CADDY, AND PUT IT IN.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/mobilerack/CSE-M35S.cfm

the box assigns scsi id's, costs about 150 dollars, including termination, and is a real elegant storage solution. The fan can be just a bit noisy.

You can use, adapters for SCA drives. The reason for doing this is usually the great deals on SCSI drives are in SCA 80 pin drives, either new or refurbed. The adapters are about 2 dollars in value, but usually charged ten dollars charged, UNLESS PACKAGED WITH THE DRIVE, LIKE

www.hypermicro.com

does.

The same two connectors 68 and 80 pin are used for scsi LVD to 320.

Do I need U160 or U320? More is better but it usually costs. Keep in mind that this will probably be the only drive/SCSI device in the system

LSI 160 OR 320 CONTROLLER CARDS ARE VERY SIMILAR IN COST. ALWAYS NICE TO BE ABLE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF 64 BIT, AND THE FASTER 320 SCSI TRANSFER FEATURES.

I'll probably want a 30~40GB drive with three partitions for XP, XP-64 and Linux

Cables, adapters terminators? Go with anything? Gotchas? I suppose I should ask who has good drivers for XP-64 & Linux?

YES, LSI SHOULD HAVE THE RIGHT DRIVERS FOR YOU, AND, I WOULD GO FOR THE 320 CARD. CHECK THEIR WEBSITE.

CABLES, THE RED ONES, ARE QUITE GOOD, AND CHEAP, ALONG WITH THE GENERIC TERMINATORS.

What about noise? I have heard conflicting reports about noise? Are all 15K a much of a muchness, or are some better? Do the quiet ones take a performance hit? Should I consider a 10K drive?

NOISE IS WAY OVERRATED. IN A GOOD CASE, YOU CAN'T HEAR MUCH OF ANYTHING.
P160 KEEPS 15.3K 36 GIG CHEETAH SILENT.
10K'S ARE GOOD, AND, THEY HAVE A MUCH HIGHER CAPACITY, BUT, WITH SLOWER ACCESS TIMES, but not by much...

SAS?. Is the PCI bus going to be a limitation?
GOOD QUESTION. DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF CHIPS GIGABYTE USES, BUT, THEY HAVE TO BE BETTER THEN APPLES...
There is nothing on the PCI bus at the moment--actually, I think the SiImg SATA controller on the K8NS-Ultra is connected to the PCI bus--I'll check the block diagrams.

As I'm in Aus, who/where should I buy?

ASK TANNIN OR THE OTHERGUYS ON THIS ONE.

What have I missed?

Thanks all

NOT MUCH. SCSI HAS NEVER BEEN CHEAPER, OR, FOR THAT MANNER, BETTER.

s

 

[Tea]

68 pin = standard, normal, I don't wear my underwear outside my clothes, everyday SCSI. Since maybe 6 years ago, everything in 68-pin SCSI has been LVD.

LVD Stands for Low Voltage Differential, or possibly Louder drives make me Very Deaf. This is the normal sort of SCSI these days. In practical terms, it means that the drives themselves no longer provide any sort of termination, you use a stand-alone terminator. Stick the terminator on the end of the SCSI cable (it's a little thing, looks like a lump of plastic with a SCSI connector on it), plug the other end of the cable into your controller card, and stick the drive(s) anywhere you like in between. Easy.

80-pin or SCA Weirdo, underwear-on-the-outside sort of SCSI connection which has two uses: (a) connecting to a backpane system (where you have a special-purpose chassis and the SCSI drives plug directly into it, rather than into a normal cable. SCA is good if you want to have 118 individual drives in a pile of external boxes for your e-commerce server), and (b) selling off cheap to optimists who think that they can just buy a cheap 68-pin to 80-pin converter and that it will actually work most of the time.

U160 or U320. What are you going to buy that is going to max out your (cheap) Ultra 160 card? Ans: nothing. Unless you plan to morph into a Greg Santilli overnight. (In which case, please buy all your gear from Tannin: he will get very rich.) Estimated working life of your Ultra 160 card is less than that of a U320 card, but with all the newfangled son-of-SCSI stuff coming out these days, your controller's lifespan is limited anyway, so why spend the extra? Hell, Tannin (cheapskate old barstard that he is) has three SCSI systems, two with U160 drives and one with a U320 drive. One of the three is on a U160 controller (which one? can't remember) and the other two are on 40 MB controller cards. The difference between the U40 and the U160 systems is marginal; not really visible without formal benchmarking.

Cables & terminators. You get a fairly decent cable and a terminator with most boxed SCSI controller card kits. Greg S will be along later to explain that Granite Digital cables will improve reliability five million percent, provide higher performance, and increase the size of your unmentionables so much that She Will Beg You For It More Often. He may be right.

Host adaptors. This is what you are supposed to call a SCSI controller card, unless you want to be Uncool and Ignorant in the World of SCSI. Adaptec are the Intel of SCSI: vastly overpriced, but at least you know it will work. Watch out for the gotchas: quite a few of the Adaptec controllers cards (sorry, host adaptors) only work with Windows: they are the winmodems of SCSI. The real ones cost even more. Try to avoid Adaptec. Tekram used the be the obvious alternative, probably still are. Tannin has two old Adaptec cards, plus a Tekram U160, which works just fine. You can even download OS/2 drivers for it if you want them. (Come to think of it, you don't need to: Ecomstation (latest OS/2) supports them right out of the box. I mention this to indicate that you shouldn't have trouble finding drivers for just about any weirdo OS you care to sample.)

Noise SCSI drives don't make any noise. The last SCSI drive I remember being able to hear was Tannin's 9GB IBM Ultrastar back when I was in my mother's wobm ... woomb ... tummy. This was quite a feat actually, as I was in Borneo at the time. Since then, I haven't been able to hear any of his newer drives at all, probably because of the industrial deafness the Ultrastar induced.

(Eh-hum.)

(Hmmmm?)

(Tea.)

(Oh allright then. I made that last bit up. They do make some noise. Sorry Bill. The more recent ones are lots quieter. Not sure how much, as El-Cheapskato hasn't bought a new one for ages.)

(That's better.)

Should you consider a 10K drive? No.

SAS. Ask someone with technical knowledge relevant to the current century. IGary would know all about this. (Don't let him talk you into spending the entire NASA budget.)

Is the PCI bus going to be a limitation? Not really. You won't have enough drives to max out your U160 controller anyway. (Unless you ignore what I said about not listening to IGary, and buy your drives in Santilli style - one drive good, ten drives gooder.)

 

[Tea]

68 pin = standard, normal, I don't wear my underwear outside my clothes, everyday SCSI. Since maybe 6 years ago, everything in 68-pin SCSI has been LVD.

LVD Stands for Low Voltage Differential, or possibly Louder drives make me Very Deaf. This is the normal sort of SCSI these days. In practical terms, it means that the drives themselves no longer provide any sort of termination, you use a stand-alone terminator. Stick the terminator on the end of the SCSI cable (it's a little thing, looks like a lump of plastic with a SCSI connector on it), plug the other end of the cable into your controller card, and stick the drive(s) anywhere you like in between. Easy.

80-pin or SCA Weirdo, underwear-on-the-outside sort of SCSI connection which has two uses: (a) connecting to a backpane system (where you have a special-purpose chassis and the SCSI drives plug directly into it, rather than into a normal cable. SCA is good if you want to have 118 individual drives in a pile of external boxes for your e-commerce server), and (b) selling off cheap to optimists who think that they can just buy a cheap 68-pin to 80-pin converter and that it will actually work most of the time.

U160 or U320. What are you going to buy that is going to max out your (cheap) Ultra 160 card? Ans: nothing. Unless you plan to morph into a Greg Santilli overnight. (In which case, please buy all your gear from Tannin: he will get very rich.) Estimated working life of your Ultra 160 card is less than that of a U320 card, but with all the newfangled son-of-SCSI stuff coming out these days, your controller's lifespan is limited anyway, so why spend the extra? Hell, Tannin (cheapskate old barstard that he is) has three SCSI systems, two with U160 drives and one with a U320 drive. One of the three is on a U160 controller (which one? can't remember) and the other two are on 40 MB controller cards. The difference between the U40 and the U160 systems is marginal; not really visible without formal benchmarking.

Cables & terminators. You get a fairly decent cable and a terminator with most boxed SCSI controller card kits. Greg S will be along later to explain that Granite Digital cables will improve reliability five million percent, provide higher performance, and increase the size of your unmentionables so much that She Will Beg You For It More Often. He may be right.

Host adaptors. This is what you are supposed to call a SCSI controller card, unless you want to be Uncool and Ignorant in the World of SCSI. Adaptec are the Intel of SCSI: vastly overpriced, but at least you know it will work. Watch out for the gotchas: quite a few of the Adaptec controllers cards (sorry, host adaptors) only work with Windows: they are the winmodems of SCSI. The real ones cost even more. Try to avoid Adaptec. Tekram used the be the obvious alternative, probably still are. Tannin has two old Adaptec cards, plus a Tekram U160, which works just fine. You can even download OS/2 drivers for it if you want them. (Come to think of it, you don't need to: Ecomstation (latest OS/2) supports them right out of the box. I mention this to indicate that you shouldn't have trouble finding drivers for just about any weirdo OS you care to sample.)

Noise SCSI drives don't make any noise. The last SCSI drive I remember being able to hear was Tannin's 9GB IBM Ultrastar back when I was in my mother's wobm ... woomb ... tummy. This was quite a feat actually, as I was in Borneo at the time. Since then, I haven't been able to hear any of his newer drives at all, probably because of the industrial deafness the Ultrastar induced.

(Eh-hum.)

(Hmmmm?)

(Tea.)

(Oh allright then. I made that last bit up. They do make some noise. Sorry Bill. The more recent ones are lots quieter. Not sure how much, as El-Cheapskato hasn't bought a new one for ages.)

(That's better.)

Should you consider a 10K drive? No.

SAS. Ask someone with technical knowledge relevant to the current century. IGary would know all about this. (Don't let him talk you into spending the entire NASA budget.)

Is the PCI bus going to be a limitation? Not really. You won't have enough drives to max out your U160 controller anyway. (Unless you ignore what I said about not listening to IGary, and buy your drives in Santilli style - one drive good, ten drives gooder.)

 

[Bozo]

80 pin drives are used mainly in hot swappable devices. They have no seperate power connector as the power come through the 80 pin connector.
68 pin drives connect up like a PATA drive; ribbon cable and a molex connector.
Terminator: Placed at the end of the cable. Some cables have them built in. Completes the circut??
Host adaptors. Be careful when picking one. Some (the low priced ones) are to add RAID capability to a motherboard that has SCSI built in. I usually buy Adaptec for RAID and LSI for stand alone. The amount of memory on the controller can make a difference. More so on RAID controllers.
Noise: The Seagate Cheetahs (15000 RPM) models we use move the heads every few seconds even when not being accessed. Thats about the only noise they make.
I wouldn't worry about U160 or U320. To me access time is more important. This is where you will see a difference.
The nice part about SCSI is that almost everything is backwards compatable. If you install a U320 drive on a U160 controller it will work.

I'd look to buy the SCSI hard drive with the lowest access time and the capacity you need. Then get the controller and cable for the drive.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Buck]

Too bad you're in Australia, I have a couple new Tekram cards I'm looking to sell. I tried eBay, but no one reached my reserve price.

 

[Santilli]

Bill: First, always be suspicious of advice given by a baby orange Furball.
:wink:
I'm not going to argue with any of his comments, since you are in Oz.

Pricing here is 15 bucks between the 160 and 320 LSI cards, 85 vs. 103, that's why I defur to Furball on this issue.
:mrgrn: :wink:

As for Granite Digital, they make a far superior product to the guys that have mission critical data on their computers. Around here, by the way, 'mission critical' is NOT rhetoric for certain residents posters.

That said, and much as I respect Ken(guy who's been at Granite Digital forever, and, their service is fantastic, lifetime warranty, even against customer misorders, and stupidity) if the red cables are what ships with Supermicro, they can't be that bad, at 1/6th the price of a GD cable.
On the otherhand, if I get the POS adaptec 2010S out of my machine, and I'm still getting 55-60 mb/sec out of a dual cheetah 15.3k boot raid, using a LSI 320 raid card, with 64 mb of ram, the only thing left is the cable, and terminator...

Furball hasn't tried LSI controllers. They have been making chips for a long time, and came on ATTO cards, some adaptec cards, Apple oem cards, IIRC, and generally have an excellent product, at a fair, or excellent price(controllers that are plug and play for 85-100 dollars are a new thing on the market. It used to be a pricefix type thing with adaptec, etc. that no scsi card was going to go for under 150-200 dollars), along with service, a word adaptec does not understand.

Likewise their single channel raid card, for 355 dollars, with 64 mb of ram, is half the price of most scsi raid adapters.

LSI has a pretty extensive list of drivers for different OS.

I'm not sure what part of Australia you are in, or is that Austria?

:eekers:

Hope this helps.

Greg

 

[LiamC]

I'm not sure what part of Australia you are in, or is that Austria?

No, Austria is where your Guvernör dur Kaliförnia comes from :lol:

Thank to all BTW

 

[Santilli]

I'm not sure what part of Australia you are in, or is that Austria?

No, Austria is where your Guvernör dur Kaliförnia comes from :lol:

Thank to all BTW

Isn't that right next to Oz, and Margeret River :?: :wink:

G

 

[Tea]

I'm a girl Greg! Or at least I've always supposed so; it's kind of hard to tell when you are covered in orange fur all over.

If (as Greg says) it's only US$15 between the 160 and 320 cards, by all means go with the 320, Bill. If it's AU$150 or something like that, then it's not worth it. Greg will be more up to date on current products and prices than I am.

Tekram controllers are LSI controllers. As Greg says, they work just fine. I imagine that you could buy a different brand card using the same LSI chipset and it would go just fine too.

In short, Greg and I pretty much agree. Seeing as (I think) we are the two main SCSI freaks here at SF, that makes it unanimous.

On the cables thing, I've never tried GD cables. But then I've never had a problem with the cables I already have, which are either the ones you get free with Tekram controllers, or else ones Tannin bought through the usual PC accessories places. Where there is a choice though, we always take the dearer (and hopefully better quality) cable. Tannin thinks he remembers having an el-cheapo one once that was crap, and replacing it with a better one. It was a while back, so he is vague.

 

[GMac]

I can back Greg up when it comes to Tekram/LSI controllers - I've been running a 390U3W in my box for more than 3 years and have never had a moment's bother with it.

GM

 

[Tannin]

Tea's memory is faulty. I have two Tekram (aka LSI chipset) U160 controllers, not one. One runs OS/2, the other W2K. Like the inimitable Gmac, I've had them for about 3 years, and never had the slightest problem with them.

 

[Santilli]

LSI has been making chips for other companies to put on their boards, for quite awhile. Now they are producing their own boards, and, for some strange reason, you can actually call tech support, and talk to a HUMAN BEING(sorry Furball :wink: ) that's an important feature for us humans.

I did that before buying their boards, and talked to their tech guy on the issue before us, 160 vs. 320. I go with his idea, get the later, and you may be able to use it in the future.

In the short term, I wonder if solid state hard drives, or cards, are close enough to use a scsi 320 interface? That, other then large raids, is the only area I can think of that can actually take advantage of 320.

If Splash is out of his pen, could he run down if the difference in features from 160 to 320, for our new member?

Thanks
G

 

[Santilli]

In short, Greg and I pretty much agree. Seeing as (I think) we are the two main SCSI freaks here at SF, that makes it unanimous.

Tanin is forgetting Splash. Dolphins are notorious scsi freaks. I think it allows the machines to sort of come close to the dolphins superior brain capacity.

Anyway, I think he's used SCSI in HUNDREDS OF computers, so he's probably
forgot more then I know about scsi...in fact, most of what I know, I've learned from Splash, and Tannin, with a bit of dabbling on the side. We had another member that retired, SF based guy, that was really good at it, too.

A superior spieces, no doubt...

s
:mrgrn:

 

[Computer Generated Baby]

Let's see if I can go all the way through this without missing something.


SAS:
Serial Attached SCSI is absolutely excellent technology, but it will be several months before the quantity of product available to the general populace finally hits a level that some price competition will take place. A SAS controller is able to attach to any mix of SAS or SATA hardware -- including all SATA.

As for SAS hard drives, out of the gate they are proving to be significantly faster at just about everything -- especially in a multi-tasking multi-user environment -- compared to Ultra-320 SCSI hard drives. The overall throughput increase is due to the enhanced SCSI protocol in SAS, part of which is the introduction of its full-duplex communications capability.



Ultra-320 versus Ultra-160:
The difference between Ultra-320 and Ultra-160 is simply SCSI bus clock rate. However, there is more than a bus clock difference between Ultra-160 and the earlier Ultra2 (80 MB/s).

Ultra-160 introduced ECC over the cable. Before Ultra-160, there was no standard ECC-over-the-SCSI-cable capability. Ultra2 introduced not only 80 MB/s, but also introduced the LVD (Low Voltage Differential) signaling protocol. Before LVD, a HVD (High Voltage Differential) signaling protocol was available, with the vast majority of SCSI hardware using Single Ended signaling protocol. The price for HVD SCSI equipment was *much* higher than SE SCSI hardware.



LSI Logic:
LSI Logic has been existence since the 1970s. LSI Logic bought an electronics design and manufacturing company called Symbios back in the late 1990s that made various integrated circuits, among which were SCSI integrated circuits and Fibre-Channel integrated circuits. Since then, LSI Logic has been producing various SCSI ICs -- and in more recent times its own brand of SCSI and Fibre-Channel adapters.

LSI has been making chips for other companies to put on their boards, for quite awhile...

Er... not quite. LSI Logic only makes LSI Logic goodies. Other companies then buy LSI Logic goodies and integrate them into their own products (adapters, SCSI-on-mobo, SCSI interfaces for external arrays

I believe you can buy a bare-bones LSI Logic SCSI adapter for less than a Tekram SCSI adapter. Tekram writes its own BIOS, as does LSI Logic and others. Even though a set of SCSI adapters from different manufacturers may have the exact same LSI Logic SCSI chipset, they are all different SCSI adapters as far as operating systems go. Some LSI Logic and Tekram SCSI adapters can use a common Windows SCSI device driver, some others can not.

Terminator: Placed at the end of the cable. Some cables have them built in. Completes the circut??

You need to have termination placed on *both* ends of a SCSI channel. Usually, the SCSI host bus adapter supplies termination one end of an LVD SCSI channel and a dedicated terminator terminates the circuit on the other end of the channel. Without circuit termination, noise can be introduced into the electrical circuit which can cause havoc with high-speed communications. Differential communications circuitry can deal with externally-introduced common mode noise better than Single-Ended communications circuitry, but differential is still not immune to the ill effects that noise can sometimes cause.

 

[CougTek]

Pricing here is 15 bucks between the 160 and 320 LSI cards, 85 vs. 103, ...

That's 18$, not 15$. :smack:

 

[LiamC]

So what to get. the Cheetah 15K.x seems to have the reputation, but the Maxtor Atlas 15K & even 10K seem to be faster (according to SR). The Fujitsu seem to be the fastest, but noise was an issue with them in another thread here?

How are the Maxtors noise wise? Some here seem to have experience with the Cheetahs being flaky. Is this true or another of the Merc/Tannin ATi/NVIDIA things? :twistd:

 

[Santilli]

I've bought pretty much nothing but cheetahs. I had one Quantum that lasted 7 years, but it was noisy, and it was a 7200 rpm drive.

I had a DOA on a refurb recently, but hypermicro replaced it ASAP.

Other then that, I can't hear the 15.3 in the Athlon, and, the only time I really hear the Cheetahs in the server is defragging, and that's in the SCA box.

Keep in mind, Oz is a different planet, and, service is a big deal for Tanin, but, the cool thing about SCSI cheetahs is you usually don't NEED service.

Seagate is about 75 minutes drive from here. Also, the Seagate guys helped me out a couple times, when I was fighting with two promise raid controllers, and 5 Maxtor 5120's.

GS

 

[GMac]

The two Maxtor 10K drives in my box (one 18GB & one 73GB) are both pretty good from a noise standpoint - they're all but inaudible except when working heavily, and even then they're not that bad. Same goes for the older Fujitsu MAJ that I use as the OS drive, although that's a little louder.

GM

 

[LiamC]

After hunting aroung, I'm leaning towards either a Maxtor Atlas 10K V or 15K II--For the price of a Cheetah 18GB, I can get a 26GB Atlas. The 10K is cheaper and seems to do well over at SR (testbed 4).

Thoughts?

 

[Santilli]

I'd talk to Tannin.

Suffice to say, Davin and the boys and I don't agree much on scsi, nor do I find their test results to reflect much. They seem to REALLY like ATA, and, their test design and results seem to be somewhat in favor of that interface. They have a website that requires to be profitable, multiple hits to make it viable for an advertizer. I'm sure the vast majority of their readers are ATA users, and, it is in Storagereviews intrest to tell you that ATA drives are as close to scsi as they can. The scsi folks know better, and the others, in the past couldn't afford scsi, or wouldn't.

Use them as guidelines for different classes of drives. I don't think you are going to be able to tell the difference between drives unless the results are over 20-40% different. In this result area, rotational speed is vitally important, so despite tests, I think you will see a difference between, 7200 rpm, 10000 rpm, and 15k, despite what they say.

I have noticed a difference between 7200 ATA vs 15.3 Cheetah in the machine I just put together, as a boot drive. Using sequential reads, I don't see much of a difference between 10k Cheetahs, and 15k(reading picture files off both 15k's, and 10k's.) Iin access times, for a boot drive, I do notice the difference between 7200, 10k, and 15k.

Again, all of this is in an ideal world, where money isn't a problem.

Tannin can give you the best recommendation for value vs. features, in OZ...

Also, I haven't used an Atlas since my very old 7200 rpm Atlas that sounded like a jet(scsi external) died.

S

 

[Corvair]

I suspect that you'll find that Fujitsu and Hitachi SCSI hard drives cost more than Seagate and Maxtor of equivalent storage capacity -- though Hitachi has been coming down in price more during the past 6 months.

Still, Seagate and Maxtor cost significantly less than Fujitsu and Hitachi. "Modern" Hitachi SCSI drives weren't worth having for a while there (hot, noisy, expensive, slow). However, with the latest generation, they are now actually worth having, provided that you can get good pricing.

 

[Santilli]

CV alias Splash, knows a small bit about scsi. Keep in mind, Tannin can help you with pricing, and service in Oz.

Splash/Corvair/Giant/CGB/Etc. are my gurus for scsi, so, follow their advice, if the price is right, in Oz///

:mrgrn:
s

 

[LiamC]

Settled on an Tekram U160 card courtesy of Buck & a Maxtor Atlas II 36GB 15K. When the card gets here I'll take it for a spin and report back

 

[Tannin]

Way to go Bill. Good choices.

 

[Pradeep]

One 36GB Atlas 15KII on a Tekram U160 controller, sitting in a 32bit PCI slot (you can see where it's maxing out the PCI bus at the beginning).

SCSI is good. Long live it.

 

[Santilli]

SMOKING :excl: :excl: :excl: :excl: :mrgrn:

GS

 

[Handruin]

What do you use a drive like that for? When I think about how nice it would be to have a 15K drive, I debate adding it as the C:\ (boot) drive, or leave it to be used for storing random files and/or games. Then I start to lean towards the boot drive so that the system is smokin fast, and now I want two of them so that my files and apps run faster... But 36GB isn't much space for apps (games) and files it doesn't make much sense to add a second one (never mind the cost).

Don't get me wrong. Seeing those numbers makes me want one, but given the cost, and available space, where do you put this drive in your system?

 

[LiamC]

Boot drive. Absolutely everything depends upon your O/S. If you primarily depend/use one particular app, then maybe a drive for that might be appropriate, but most people use lots of apps, less often with lots of data files. ATA should be good enough for these.

Seeing those numbers though, SCSI in a 4X or 8x PCI-e slot makes a lot of sense. At the moment, all of my storage hangs off of the PCI bus--because the system is overclocked and the PCI bus can be clock locked.

 

[Pradeep]

My self justification for buying them was to test out an application at work, to make sure it's not disk bound. I want to see the CEO's face when I show him more than 25% util on Gigabit Ethernet. Also I need to know how many network connections can read/write images to the drive before they see a performance degradation.

A PCI-E RAID controller is definitely in the future.

 

[Pradeep]

To add:

It'll be one drive for OS and apps, one drive for data. I already had the controller card and SCA enclosure, so there was no setup cost for me. I have two 18GB Seagate 15K.2s, but they aren't really cutting edge anymore, plus 18GB is really quite limiting. Perhaps a RAID 0 for them for temp files.

 

[LiamC]

Another question. What is a reasonable drive temperature for a 15K? Speedfan is measuring the drive temp as being between 47 & 52 deg C.

Should I be actively cooling it?

 

[Onomatopoeic]

A PCI-E RAID controller is definitely in the future.

And once you get your PCI-E Ultra-320 RAID or SCSI host bus adapter card, you'll see a rather significant boost in throughput with your existing Maxtor drives.

Replace all the above with a PCI-E SAS RAID or SAS host bus adapter card, SAS versions of the same Maxtor drive mechanism, yet another significant boost in performance.

Bottom line: If you are buying new, don't invest in any products based on Ultra-320 SCSI technology.