Can I use a 15,000 rpm cheetah?

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Now I see your second post... I'll take a look at that PCI latency thingy myself for general knowledge, thanks.

Also, now that I've read the second article (ADFD Raptor review), I see that it beats the SCSI drives in single-user mode but the thing is that the review lacks, for example, the Fujitsu MAX. On a tangent, do you happen to know if the MAX drives use perpendicular recording?

Edit - Nice catch on his interface (80mb/s), no wonders!
 
But I got my whole setup (card, adapter, cable, new 73GB MAX) from ebay for less than the price of a 74GB Raptor, so it can be done on the cheap - and I have seen 18mth old latest gen 7?GB SCSI drives go for £20-£25 quite regularly on ebay, so it can be done even cheaper if you're prepared to go with a second hand drive - and with the longevity of SCSI drives, it's certainly an option.

The MAX apparently performs exactly the same as the MAU, I think that's why storage review haven't bothered with a review:

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=24858&hl=fujitsu++max

edit: check out continuum's post in the above. I've also seen a couple of comments around the web that say the same thing.

And yeah, you are right to attack SCSI - it's not as fast on the desktop as it could be if it was optimised - but it's still damn fast and good fun to do if you're sad like me and enjoy the tinkering :)
 
Wow I truly have no idea how you pulled that off (in terms of cheapness on ebay). My card cost me about 80 pounds plus another 100 for the drive, 180 pounds = roughly 360USD. I guess in the last 3 years SCSI crap has made its way onto ebay in a big way, or maybe come down in price in general. I've looked on ebay (yesterday for that matter), and there are no MAX drives available currently.
 
Most of the drives on ebay.co.uk are branded as HP / Dell, etc - I just asked the seller to give me all the details on the labels so that I was able to work out from there what they *really* are. Mine was an HP 365699-008, which turned out to have MAX3073NC on it (i.e. Fujitsu MAX)

I just had a look on the US ebay site for you and came up with a couple of options:

This is an MAU 147GB currently going for $100:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fujitsu-147GB-15K-SCSI-HARDDRIVE-ULTRA320-147-GB-80-PIN_W0QQitemZ130090886825QQcategoryZ39975QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

And here's a 73GB MAU with current bid of 1 cent:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fujitsu-73GB-15K-SCSI-HARDDRIVE-ULTRA320-73-GB-80-PIN_W0QQitemZ130091019562QQcategoryZ30969QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I don't see any second hand ones there, perhaps I don't know how to use ebay.com properly :) But it looks much cheaper on there than it is on the UK site anyway!
 
Yeah I'll need to factor in the higher shipping, plus not all will ship abroad. But thanks. Since they are labelled under HP/Dell/whatever else, what do you search for? Just SCSI?
 
Now I see your second post... I'll take a look at that PCI latency thingy myself for general knowledge, thanks.

Also, now that I've read the second article (ADFD Raptor review), I see that it beats the SCSI drives in single-user mode but the thing is that the review lacks, for example, the Fujitsu MAX. On a tangent, do you happen to know if the MAX drives use perpendicular recording?

Edit - Nice catch on his interface (80mb/s), no wonders!
Click to expand...

I killed 2 Seagate 18GB 10K drives and a Hitachi 9GB 10K SCSI drive on the U160 card before I realized that the card was killing the drives :-(

Too lazy to get another card, so I stuck the Atlas 15K II on my old faithful 80M/sec card. The drive's capable of 95MB/sec, so, pity.

Just chiming in to say that from a 7200rpm IDE drive, what a world of difference! It is a pity that server drives aren't optimized for desktop use, even though the drive mechanics are so much better, thus, a Raptor can perform similarly to my hard drive in "real world desktop" apps. Wish the HDD manufacturers would wake up to the enthusiasts who are willing to shell out money for more performance than the raptors :-D

Or be like Seagate and have a Desktop mode. Can't find a similar tool for my drive.
 
Unfortunately we don't even know how effective that Desktop mode is... For me personally it didn't change anything!
Click to expand...

Before my Seagate 18GB drive died, I had benchmark results on the difference, it is significant when benched with h2benchw.

Whereas desktop mode increased access time by about 1ms, it also increased desktop performance (according to h2benchw, which is a 'desktop' benchmark), especially in copying (which would make sense... server drives typically don't do much reading ahead because the workload is highly random, desktop drives do read a lot ahead because the workload is more 'linear' ie. loading a level [linear reading], defragging [even fragments are typically in short, linear segments], etc. are pretty 'linear')
 
We've been talking about the Fujitsu drives a lot, so I just wanted to bring up what I was wondering - why the heck have a new revision (MAX) if its the same as the MAU performance-wise? And do you know if/when there will be a new one with perpendicular recording?

I'll run some h2benchw tests with and without Desktop mode and see. If it really does help, I wonder what the 15K.5 would score with the mode on. Very interesting indeed.
 
We've been talking about the Fujitsu drives a lot, so I just wanted to bring up what I was wondering - why the heck have a new revision (MAX) if its the same as the MAU performance-wise? And do you know if/when there will be a new one with perpendicular recording?

I'll run some h2benchw tests with and without Desktop mode and see. If it really does help, I wonder what the 15K.5 would score with the mode on. Very interesting indeed.
Click to expand...

Make sure you change the number of cache segments to 16 in desktop mode, when I left it at 3 it hurt performance.
 
Interesting, mine is set to 28. There is the choice for Default, which is 28, or where you can specify, where it also has 28 in the field.

While we're at it, could you tell me how to run h2benchw? It's all in german so its a bit confusing 😛 If you have some english version or whatever, I'd appreciate a link. Thanks!
 
For a single drive, ultra320 is good enough? SAS isn't necessary unless you do raid / multiple drives?

I'd rather buy this drive:

http://cgi.ebay.com/147GB-Fujitsu-SAS-Serial-Attached-SCSI-MAU3147RC_W0QQitemZ180095720554QQcategoryZ11160QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

330 bucks for a 147gigs 15k rpm

I've seen the 74 gig version go for 275 (legit) which is cheap, but another 50 bucks doubles the space. 😀

I could always drop another 330 for another 150 gigs if i really need that much space 😛 @ that speed.
 
Interesting, mine is set to 28. There is the choice for Default, which is 28, or where you can specify, where it also has 28 in the field.

While we're at it, could you tell me how to run h2benchw? It's all in german so its a bit confusing 😛 If you have some english version or whatever, I'd appreciate a link. Thanks!
Click to expand...

Huh, I bet my drive's older than yours. Mine had "3" as number of cache segments; my drives have 4MB cache (except they're dead now). I didn't know that the cache segments could be more than 16 😛

try "h2benchw -english" :-D

H2bench -- by Harald Bögeholz & Lars Bremer / c't Magazin für Computertechnik
Version 3.6/Win32, Copyright (C) 2002 Heise Zeitschriften Verlag GmbH & Co. KG
Dutch translation by F&L Technical Publications B.V.
usage: h2bench [options] [<drive>]
options:
-a perform all measurements
-z perform zone measurement
-s measure seek time
-c <n> measure interface speed at n % of total capacity ("core test")
-p measure application profiles
-d <n> check data integrity (first <n> sectors fully checked)
-dt <n> specify duration of third phase of integrity check in seconds
-tt "<txt>" specify title text (hard drive model)
similarly: -tb (BIOS version), -tc (CPU), -tm (motherboard),
-ta (host adapter), -ts (media; for removable drives)
-w <file> save results in files <file>.*
-! do write benchmarks (default: read-only)
-deutsch auf deutsche Version umschalten
-nederlands switch naar de Nederlandse versie
<drive> Nummer of drive to test (0=first physical disk etc.)
 
Yeah I'll need to factor in the higher shipping, plus not all will ship abroad. But thanks. Since they are labelled under HP/Dell/whatever else, what do you search for? Just SCSI?
Click to expand...

I just search for SCSI 15K. Are you in the UK then?
 
We've been talking about the Fujitsu drives a lot, so I just wanted to bring up what I was wondering - why the heck have a new revision (MAX) if its the same as the MAU performance-wise? And do you know if/when there will be a new one with perpendicular recording?
Click to expand...

From the research I did the only difference between the MAX and the MAU is RoHS compliance, which is the removal of lead from the components of the drive. It's an EU standard, so I think that's why you see the MAU still around in the US a lot, but not in the UK.

As far as PMR - given that Seagate just went that way with the 15K.5, I expect it won't be long until their competitors catch up. But that is pure speculation :)
 
For a single drive, ultra320 is good enough? SAS isn't necessary unless you do raid / multiple drives?
Click to expand...

Yup, U320 is easily good enough for 1 drive (infact up to 3/4 if you have PCI64). You should be able to pick up a 147GB MAU for less than those prices as well :)
 
We've been talking about the Fujitsu drives a lot, so I just wanted to bring up what I was wondering - why the heck have a new revision (MAX) if its the same as the MAU performance-wise? And do you know if/when there will be a new one with perpendicular recording?
Click to expand...

From the research I did the only difference between the MAX and the MAU is RoHS compliance, which is the removal of lead from the components of the drive. It's an EU standard, so I think that's why you see the MAU still around in the US a lot, but not in the UK.

As far as PMR - given that Seagate just went that way with the 15K.5, I expect it won't be long until their competitors catch up. But that is pure speculation :)

Yes, I'm in the UK.
As for Seagate having "just gone that way" in terms of perpendicular recording, the 15K.5 is already about half a year old isn't it? That's why I originally assumed that the latest MAX model surely would utilise PMR although you told me I was wrong, which was really surprising.

Edit - Oh yeah, there's a number of Fujitsu Siemens 15K SCSI drives that show up on the UK ebay right now. Here is an example:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=007&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&viewitem=&item=170090711831&rd=1&rd=1
I asked the seller how these correspond to the Fujitsu models (and gave them a link) but at least they honestly said they weren't sure. If anyone has any idea how to find out what Fujitsu model that drive corresponds to, that would be really useful.
 
Hmm. I had a look around and couldn't find any concrete info - the best way would be to ask Fujitsu themselves I guess?

I would be 90% sure that these are MAX drives, except that these have the SCA hot-pluggable interface rather than 68 pin. They are 15K and are being sold all over Europe from the search I just did - AFAIK Fujitsu only do the MAX now as 15K SCSI in Europe.

It's a bit of a risk, but then again it's a very cheap price.

I'll see if I can find anything else.
 
I can't find any link between that damn drive and it's underlying model anywhere! It seems to be a drive that's specifically for a Fujitsu Siemens server though (like a branded HP / Dell) - probably still worth speaking to Fujitsu, but it normally retails for £185+, so it must be pretty nice.

Anyway, good luck with it - there's also an Atlas II and a nice looking 147GB Fujitsu on there too :)
 
Thanks. I've added it to my watch list. I will keep in mind though that from what I understand it's a slightly worse performer for a single-user scenario, so my bids will be correspondingly lower 😉
 
I'm trying to assess whether to go to 15k SCSI or 10k Raptor.

I've read some of the comments in various threads in this and other forums as well as reviews/comparisons found elsewhere. Forgetting about price, their doesn't appear to be a clear winner although for single user desktop applications the Raptor seems to be king but even this seems to be open to conjecture since many swear that the SCSI is faster even in this environment.

Is there any data comparing RAID 0 Raptors and SCSI?
 
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