Anyone running SCSI ?

[[GDI]Raptor]

SCSI

My operating system is on a Seagate Cheatha X15 18,6Gb Harddrive (15000 rpm), and that harddrive is not so noisy! I don't complain Ultra160 SCSI is nice.....

My Adaptec SCSI card is very stable!

I have four Ultra160 SCSI harddrives.....
1x Seagate 15000rpm 18,6Gb (Windows XP)
1x IBM Ultrastar 10000rpm 36,6Gb (Games & Programs)
1x IBM Ultrastar 10000rpm 18,6Gb (MP3 & Video)
1x IBM Ultrastar 7200rpm 9,1Gb (Documents)

CD-ROM, and CD-Burner om SCSI (Plextor)
DVD-ROM is the only IDE Device!

[Dr Mordrid]

Randy,

Those of us who edit video need AT LEAST 80 gigs.

For a minimum system using DV it comes to 3.5 megs/second x 3600 seconds/hour = 13 gigs/hour of storage, not counting editing space. Now...if one has more than one project going at a time (NOT unusual) things add up fast.

Add the need for 720x480 images sequences (literally thousands of 720x480 bitmaps) at 30-40 mb/s (144 gigs/hour) and that 80 gigs gets used up fast. This is what it takes to edit high quality animation before rendering it to a finished format like MPEG-2.

Even if one doesn't do animations then just the use of uncompressed YUY2 video for special effects sequences comes to over 70 gigs/hour.

I for one NEED my 240 gig RAID array for both speed and size, and I'm conspiring to up it to over 512 gigs.

Dr. Mordrid

[Indiana]

Yes, correct. A simple 2 hour capture at full PAL res will take ~70 GB - and this is already with HuffYUV compression!

[Randy Simons]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
Randy,

Those of us who edit video need AT LEAST 80 gigs.

Ok, this line alone was enough I forgot about video-editing, it indeed requires a lot of space.

But when you use IDE raid it most likely will be software RAID. Unless you have a really expensive IDE card.

W2k also has software raid, so it can be done with any IDE or SCSI drives. No points for IDE again this round

[Greebe]

But when you use IDE raid it most likely will be software RAID. Unless you have a really expensive IDE card.

I'd like to hear more details on why this claim is made and also define "really expensive" please.

[Wombat]

I have a 45GB drive, and it's bulging at the seams. I just bought and installed MW4, and it's about 1.1GB for a full install (minimal is almost 500MB. Heh, "minimal").
Deus Ex takes about 2GB after you've played it for a while. I just burned a bunch of my saved games (can be 30+MB per save)to CD to recover the HD space.

I have 10GB of MP3s on there. The majority of that is a small part of my ~300CD collection. I'd like to have it all on there, if I had the space.

[Randy Simons]

Originally posted by Greebe
I'd like to hear more details on why this claim is made and also define "really expensive" please.

I once read a test of such a Promise/Highpoint "RAID" IDE card versus the software-raid of W2k.
Both transferrates and CPU usage were identical. While that doesn't proof it, it is more than suspicious.

Anyway, real hardware RAID takes more than a €20 controller. Those RAID chips are little more than just another IDE controller + software to get a RAID setup. Thus, in fact they are just another marketing trick.

However, they do provide a (software) RAID setup in win9X, which isn't possible with only the OS.

But these are just my assumptions, can't back them up with any evidence atm. Too lame to google now

[edit]
In a price listing here: 3ware Escalade 6400B (4-port, ATA66) FL 899,- (==€408)
And that's a cheap version.
[/edit]

[Indiana]

Randy, and what does it matter when you can get up to 60-70 GB/sec. transferrate with two cheap IBM 40GB drives?!? And such a setup is easily able to take 30+GB/sec SUSTAINED (with low CPU utilization).
You'll need a VERY pricey SCSI disk to achieve this, and if you want an 80Gig one...
The performance advantage of SCSI nowadays really isn't there anymore for large transfers. What SCSI drives normally still are better at is accessing lots of small files (esp. when the HD is not optimized) since they usually still have lower seek times and larger Caches than their IDE counterparts. I also have the feeling that the quality controls of SCSI HDs is better.

IMHO the main advantages of SCSI nowadays are mostly the flexibility with up to 7 (15) devices and support for external devices.

[Randy Simons]

I never said that it IDE was crap or something but with SCSI in software raid it would be just a bit faster.

My entire point is that SCSI does have an advantage over IDE. Not much, and indeed you must ask yourself if you want to spend twice as much for a SCSI rig. I think most home users won't notice the difference.
But, if you want/need the highest performance and have money enough to spend, than I say go for SCSI.

And I don't think many of us bought a Matrox card just because they were cheap huh?

[RusCoder]

CHHAS

RusCoder, could you elaborate on that a bit ?

Certainly, I can.
One day your drive will crash. Let's imagine you will need to repair partitions, rebuild the FAT etc. You will have to use a low-level DOS utility (e.g. Norton DiskEdit) to fulfill the task. So you might need a bunch of DOS drivers for you SCSI card to be loaded before accessing the disk(s). They, i.e. drivers, might a) be very hard to get or be absent at the time of the disk failure, b) eat a lot of memory, c) be not fully DOS-compatible.

Three years ago I experienced something like that. Now my system at work has an IDE boot drive and a SCSI drive for common use.

That's the main reason I can think of for not having a SCSI boot drive with anything valuable stored on it.
Anyway, good luck!

[Randy Simons]

RusCoder:

That is true for SCSI cards WITHOUT a BIOS.

My Adaptec 2940 has its own BIOS, and does not need any special drivers to work in DOS (or Windows with compatibility mode for that matter)

However, when you want to access a CD-ROM attached to the card in DOS, you might need a driver.

But in case of the well-known Adaptec-series, the drivers needed are already on the Win98 boot flop and Win2K/XP install CD.

[Lemmin]

CPU usage

I think one aspect of SCSI that you are overlooking is that it doesn't basically touch the CPU and interrupts while transfering, which IDE STILL seems to be doing.

I understand that ATA was supposed to get round the CPU access problem, but it doesn't seem to have, as far as I can tell. For instance, if someone accesses my SCSI hard disks over the network to copy files on or off them, I don't even notice, whereas if they access one of my IDE drives my movies or games can grind to a halt.

The heat and noise don't seem to be a problem - I have a pair of modern 10k rpm drives and they are quieter than my fans - and much much quieter than the DVD/CD drives when they are spinning. The inside of my case is always cold. I would recommend with older drives that you keep them cooled or seperated however - I had 3 seagate barracudas and an IBM all sitting next to each other, all 7200rpm drives, and one day they went critical and I lost the IBM and 2 seagates. Air gaps are important.

The other thing about SCSI is that they are generally DESIGNED for higher performance jobs - when selling to the comsumer, you can dump in lots of marketoid terms like '133' and 'ultra' and people will think its faster - often the drive mechanism itself ISN'T faster though, and the buffer is usually small. Modern SCSI is designed for server and high-end workstation users who can pay the money and need the performance, and so the mechanism is very fast, and they usually have 4mb+ of buffer.

In real life my SCSIs are about twice as fast at transfering stuff than my ATA IDE drives, and the access time makes a noticeable difference.

Lemmin

[xortam]

I've been running pure SCSI systems at home for over a dozen years and have never had any problem in recovering corrupted boot drives. I always reject the idea of adding IDE devices because it consumes additional system resources (and possibly creating unavoidable interrupt conflicts) and their many drawbacks aren't worth the cost savings. I may consider a pure IDE system in the future but I have an investment in a plethora of SCSI devices that I have accumulated over the years. Please read the SCSI FAQ if you're interested in SCSI or are looking for additional information.

[superfly]

I can attest to that since I've been running scsi for the last 5 years of so,the simple fact that the scsi bus protocol is built to allow for multiple transactions at the same time makes all the difference when you have alot of scsi peripherals...


I'm now running the latest gen of seagate's X-15 drives(2 in raid 0),each of which have 8 megs of cache that very nearly saturates the controler i'm using it with(29160-64 bit) in sustained reads and writes and win 2000 boots in less than 20 seconds and every single app or game i have loads up almost imediately.

[Dr Mordrid]

"really expensive RAID card". You mean like an SCSI one?

The Fasttrak IDE RAID cards run about or just under $100 USD these days, and some for only about $50 USD.

Very often, if not most of the time, the price of a hardware RAID + drives is less than an SCSI software RAID with the same # of drives.

As for the advantages of hardware vs. software:

Hardware can be used from multiple OS's, including those that don't support software RAID. I use this to "see" the same RAID from Win9x, Win2K and XP all the time.

Also many, like the Fasttraks, support hot swapping.

And now the biggie: I've had several software RAID's fail. This in both NT4 and Win2K. I've never, AS IN EVER, had a Fasttrak RAID go to hell in the several years I've been using them.

Dr. Mordrid