Anyone running SCSI ?

[CHHAS]

I just found a really good deal on an 9GB IBM 18LZX 10K rpm SCSI drive, but I wonder if it is worth the cost.
The drive itself is the same price as a typical 40GB ATA drive (GXP 60, WD 40BB, Fireball AS+), but I'll have to get a SCSI card too.

The small size of drive is not an issue, I would use it as a boot drive and keep my data on a larger ATA drive.

I mainly use my system for basic stuff like surfing, gaming etc.

I guess my question comes down to this:

Is an older 10K rpm SCSI drive worth the expense when compared to newer generation ATA drives ?

[dZeus]

compare measured access times on www.storagereview.com between this drive and your 'old' ata one... low access times is what makes SCSI drives really fly (especially for loading programs with fragmented data over the whole disc, as happens gradually with an OS/programs partition.

[spoogenet]

I would say it is, but that's because I already run SCSI, already have a 9 GB IBM drive, and would like to get another one. Unfortunately, the drives I want (like the one you found) aren't made anymore.

b

[RusCoder]

The small size of drive is not an issue, I would use it as a boot drive and keep my data on a larger ATA drive.

IMHO, it's not the best idea to use a SCSI drive as a boot drive in a system with another IDE drive. It might be the pain in the <skipped> if\when things go wrong.

Just my 2 kopecks.

[CHHAS]

RusCoder, could you eloborate on that a bit ?

[isochar]

I've been using a scsi boot drive for over 4 years. The only "pain in the ass" that I have to deal with is disconnecting all IDE devices before doing a clean Win2k/XP install. No problems whatsoever.

[Randy Simons]

I avoided that by simply getting rid of all IDE devices SCSI all the way!

To get back to the original question:

Is an older 10K rpm SCSI drive worth the expense when compared to newer generation ATA drives ?

Not that I have that much experience with various SCSI drives, but SCSI in general is faster than IDE, because it seem to be a generation ahead and more designed for speed rather than cost-effectiveness. Besides that, I get the impression that SCSI drives are more robust than IDE drives.

If it is worth the extra expense (often more than twice as much as you would pay for an IDE drive of the same capacity) is up to you: if you're willing to pay a price for significantly higher performance and stability of the drive, then certainly yes.

[Dr Mordrid]

In terms of speed for editing SCSI drives are;

1. too expensive on a cost/benefit curve. You can set up massive IDE storage with more than enough speed for any multimedia use for a fraction of the cost of smaller SCSI systems.

2. exhibit virtually NO advantages in sequential read/write speed vs. the last couple of generations of IDE devices.

3. Scatter R/W is nice for databases with tons of small data elements, but its advantages for multimedia are highly in question since MM deals mainly with sequential R/W of large files.

SCSI at one time was a distinct advantage in workstations as it provided standardized multiple connects for scanners and all manner of other hardware to a single controller.

This is not such an advantage now that USB and IEEE-1394 are taking over that roll at much lower price points, especially with the updating of IEEE-1394 to 800 megabit speed levels in the next release and multi-gigabit levels later on.

Not to mention that SerialATA is coming after ATA133's life cycle is finished.

Dr. Mordrid

[Wombat]

I want one of those Adaptec cards that makes 4 IDE drives act like 1 SCSI drive.

[Randy Simons]

Dr Mordrid:

Yes, SCSI is more expensive. But in reality most people don't need 80GB of HD space. That is pure overkill. I have 21GB, and I might add that I use my computer A LOT for lots of different things.

And while the transferspeeds of IDE might be quite good these days, they can't beat high-end SCSI. Besides, even when doing not much more than some websurfing, some games etc, SCSI will be faster. Lower accesstimes (much more imporatant than transfer rates. Why is everybody so focused on those damn rates?) Larger buffers (my >1 year old AtlasV has 4MB buffer, quite significant performance boost)

ATA133 and SerialATA are marketing-blahblah. It is true that ATA33 is not enough anymore, but ATA66 is really all you need with current HD's.

Agreed, for most people it IDE is more than adequate. But, if PCs are (part of) your hobby, and you want quality and performance, than SCSI is certainly added value.

[Randy Simons]

Originally posted by Wombat
I want one of those Adaptec cards that makes 4 IDE drives act like 1 SCSI drive.

Ehh? URL? And "act" is not "is"

Btw, did you know that Windows actually uses SCSI commands for IDE, but that a software-layer transforms them into IDE?

[dZeus]

Originally posted by Randy Simons
...

ATA133 and SerialATA are marketing-blahblah. It is true that ATA33 is not enough anymore, but ATA66 is really all you need with current HD's.

...

though you have to keep in mind that ATA133 was also developed to work around the 120? GB limit (somewhere around that value) for IDE drives following the ATA33/66/100 specs. Intel doesn't support this standard developed by Quantum/Maxtor (yet?), because they think Serial ATA is close enough not to see ATA133 as a viable product (or of course other reasons I can't guess at ).

Though it seems that Serial ATA is still at least a year away, so it might be funny to see IDE drives being limited to 120GB until Serial ATA is mainstream

Another thing (more of a question):
Imagine you have a HDD and a CDROM drive, which each can reach 33Mbps on their own, connected to the same cable, thus on the same IDE channel. Would the IDE drive and the CDROM drive being accessed at the same time (not on a fixed point in time, but say, over a few seconds), be able to reach only 33Mbps over each second on a ATA33 connection, and 66MBps on a ATA66 connection (assuming that ATA33 can do 33MBps, and ATA66 66, which of couse isn't true?). If ATA66 does help both devices to reach higher throughput over a certain period of time, then those faster standards do at least make some sence when you connect more than 2 devices to your 2 IDE channels

[Ali]

Something that hasnt been mentioned yet is that a 10K SCSI drive is VERY noisy. It will also have to be cooled.

Im going from experiance with a 4.5Gb Cheetch 10K I have. IT has to have a fan blowing on it, and it goes 'ug' every few seconds to reset everything for heat changes.

On another note, my main computer now has a 4 drive IBM 60GXP RAID (Stripe) and it hasnt got the 'nippyness' of the Cheetah. All the benchmarks say the RAID wipes the floor with the cheetah, but from a desktop feel I would go with the SCSI. Not sure if thats something wrong with my current system though, because it seems a little slower than my old system even though everything should be faster.

The old was a P3 1Gig (133mhz FSB) with 256MB RAM and the cheetah as boot, and 2X 9.1Gig 7200 SCSI drive for storage, and a G400 32DH all on a Abit BX6 mobo.

The new one is a TB1.4 at 1.6 (water cooled) with 256Mb DDR Ram at 153Mhz FSB, 4X 20Gig 60GXPs Striped with modded onboard Promise controller (Gigabyte 7DXR mobo), and a Radeon LE hacked and running at 200/200Mhz. Everything else is the same.

Although the new computer benches faster, the old Intel machine 'felt' faster. This could be due to the change from the SCSI drives.

If noise is an issue for you, stay away from the 10K drives though.

Ali

[Wombat]

Randy:
I'll find a URL. I don't know the product name off the top of my head. It's an expensive card. There's a 2 IDE drive model, and a very expensive 4 drive model.

As for how it "acts", it outperforms a single SCSI drive with all the nice RAIDing the Adaptec card does for it.

And no, I didn't know that there was a wrapper layer like that.

[Taz]

Wombat, is this the card your refering to? I hope it performs better than their old one, (AHA-UDMA), which was extremely slow in the reviews I saw for it.