Can I use a 15,000 rpm cheetah?

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Sure if you don't use a pagefile then obviously RAID0 is better for performance than no RAID. I have had Raptors, SCSIs, RAIDed and not. What's far more interesting is that your claims aren't backed by any benchmarks or concrete evidence what-so-ever. At least mine are backed by one of the most recognised storage review sites out there. Let's not forget you're the guy that tries to sell his SCSI drives basing price on RPM, a reminder from your PM "US. Probably around $80 for a 10k and $100 for a 15k." - no sizes, no models. When I asked you what models they were, you didn't even know! Do you even know what Cheetahs you have in RAID0??
 
There have been 5 different 15K Cheetahs through the years, their performance varies immensely! Which are in your RAID0?
 
Since its the 15K.4, you would do yourself a big favour by getting SeaTools Enterprise and selecting Desktop mode for them, the .4s benefit from it a lot for single-user uses.
 
I'll second that. I bought an adaptec 19160n pci card on e-bay for about $25. It fits in a 32bit pci slot, Two devices transferring at 80mb/sec should be no problem. Swarch for 15k scsi and 36gb, You can find 18gb units for $25, and 36gb for not too much more. Look carefully to see that you get a 68pin device. Many 15k devices come from servers with 80 pin connections that combine power and data. You don't need the hassle of a 68/80 pin converter. No drivers are needed in windows. I used a fujitsu, and it ran reasonably quiet, and was reliable.
 
Yeah just recently I picked up a boxed Adaptec 29160 card still sealed and everything off ebay for 14 pounds with delivery (thats like 28USD), purely because it was going so cheap and I thought it would be handy to have a spare just in case. The box came with a 5 port terminated SCSI cable too, so definitely a real bargain. I use the 68pin-80pin converters myself though - yes they are extra hassle but you can pick up an 80pin drive cheaper probably for the very reason that the 68pin ones seem to be under higher demand! A trade-off, of course.
 
To back up those hardware stats provided by fedor I went to a local builder/supplier who sells a ton of equipment to the the navy, local governments, police forces etc and he told me that these larger operations have all dropped SCSI. Even his distributor doesn't stock them for ready delivery anymore because of the exodus from this media which would seem to negate the thought that this was just a localized or anecdotal report.

Apparently the IT departments in these organizations have done their own tests to support the notion that they are not faster, safer etc.

This builder/supplier went on to say his techs have tested scsi to raptors and found the raptors faster in the desktop environment. They haven't in a server environment as presumably the orgs they sell to have their own IT people to do these tests which is why they've dinosaured them.

He also went on to support fedor's OMG factor which has to do more with emotion/perception than reality.

So it seems that raided raptors do beat raided scsi at least as far as I can tell...at least in the desktop environment and from what I've been told, also or comparable in the server environment.
 
Raptors absolutely do not beat SCSIs in a server enviroment. SCSIs are made to run at full speed for long periods of time. That would wear down a Raptor very quickly comparred to the SCSI. My SCSIs (Cheetah 15k.4) have a 2.66ms average seek time. The Raptor X is 4.6ms. My SCSISs load maps faster and I get an average increase of 4fps comparred to my Raptor.
 
I'll second that. I bought an adaptec 19160n pci card on e-bay for about $25. It fits in a 32bit pci slot, Two devices transferring at 80mb/sec should be no problem. Swarch for 15k scsi and 36gb, You can find 18gb units for $25, and 36gb for not too much more. Look carefully to see that you get a 68pin device. Many 15k devices come from servers with 80 pin connections that combine power and data. You don't need the hassle of a 68/80 pin converter. No drivers are needed in windows. I used a fujitsu, and it ran reasonably quiet, and was reliable.
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Good to see someone else doing SCSI through ebay - it's great value, provides great performance and fun to do. Be careful though - two SCSI disks could saturate the 32 bit PCI bus (max bandwidth 133MB/s)

Fedor - did you buy a disk on ebay in the end?
 
So it seems that raided raptors do beat raided scsi at least as far as I can tell...at least in the desktop environment and from what I've been told, also in the server environment.
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Raptors do very well against SCSI 15K for desktop tasks, but are totally annihilated for server usage.
 
Well I certainly don't have the experience or expertise in these matters that other contributors have. However, there must be a reason why they are experiencing diminishing market share even in the server market.

After speaking with my local builder I further called some boutique builders around the US. Some didn't any longer equip their server clients with SCSI and when asked they said there was virtually no performance difference and many of the metrics for servers actually were worse with SCSI.

The other boutiques that did carry them basically said that they were keeping them around for the old diehard customers who insisted on SCSI without regard for analytics suggesting otherwise.

What they did seem to echo was what fedor said about raided raptors or other larger drives being faster than raided scsi at least in the desktop arena and probably the server area as well. They said that transfer rates and other metrics are not in themselves going to tell you what 'work' is going to get accomplished...that there are other factors at work to that can negate the fact that one has twice the rate of another i.e. it isn't a linear relationship.

The overall consensus was that it is a dying technology. Again, this is by no means scientific and I barely know what I'm talking about so take these results with a grain of salt. It was kind of a quick and dirty poll and I bet others could find other builders saying just the opposite.

It also might be a fun ebay project as well just to tinker around as ethel has suggested and I'm trying to learn as I go.
 
Yeah I agree with Comptia_Rep in that SCSI as in parallel SCSI is dying, but not Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). This quite naturally mirrors desktop users dropping PATA for SATA, and quite understandably this has taken more time for enterprise-grade hardware because they'd only jump ship once everything was ironed out (so they got a chance to learn from SATA1 mistakes, shortcomings, and so on, whilst adding their own functions too). Also an important thing to note is that SCSI/SAS drives are fast moving to the 2.5" form factor. Since these drives don't generally need huge capacities, the 2.5" size is now feasible because of advances in data density, whilst taking up way less space, generating less heat, and drawing less energy. The key really being taking up less space though, since that means a server/server room/datacenter/whatever can have way more drives. They don't perform quite as well as the 3.5"s naturally, but they are if anything more suited towards their intended use. The 3.5"s are somewhat like the Concorde at this point - the king of speed, but not cost effective.

As for raided Raptors beating raided SCSI for enterprise/server applications, I certainly don't know first-hand, because I just don't have an environment to test them myself. But everything I've read and seen first-hand suggests that they win only in the desktop environment. Firmware, firmware, firmware. If one of these companies caught on that there is enthusiast demand and made a SCSI drive with the right firmware, it would naturally be able to beat the Raptor (although it's questionable by how much, since the new 1TB Hitachi 7200rpm gives the Raptor a run for its money as it is - meaning seek times just don't play such a big role in desktops).

Ethel - yeah I searched and searched on ebay till a drive came along for cheap, which only happened about 5 days ago, with me painfully watching hundreds of items till that point heh! I ended up getting a MAX3036, for 20.50 pounds (about 41USD) with delivery, but I've only just sent the cheque to the guy since he doesn't take PayPal, so will have to wait till it clears and I get the drive! All the MAUs and Atlas IIs that I was watching ended up going for at least 100USD, which was more than I was prepared to spend! The 36GB drive is perfect since I don't need any more space for just my OS.
 
Lets see


150$ Raptor for server environment
1000$ SAS hard drive (300gig) for server environment.



If a raptor was that great, hard drives like the Maxtor Altas would not exsist since the cost is nearly 8x more.

Raptors are not all godly, they are great fast user hard drives and no company with data worth losing AND that has a lot of random data access, would chose a raptor.

My company is massive. We have about 100k machines, I work with about 20k of them. We have every kind of networking configuration you can imagine. I dont directly work with the high level networking such as 500tb San storage arrays and what not... but I do know raptors are not a drive of choice.
 
Why is that in reply to me? I never said that Raptors were better in server environments. In fact I specifically said that the Raptors were initially launched as entry-level enterprise drives but failed!
 
Nice - 20 quid is a good deal for a 36GB Fujitsu MAX. My experience with the MAU (=MAX as you know) is that it is really fast, and not as loud as I thought it would be. Infact I've got it suspended now in a P150 case and I can hardly hear it.
 
Right ok, np.

Ethel - yeah I thought 20 quid was a good deal, everything else was going for way more. The guy labelled the auction rather badly, no Fujitsu or MAX or anything in the title, so I think that lots of people didn't really pay attention to it. And yeah I know that MAX = environmentally-friendly MAU 😛 so I was on the lookout for both/either! By the time my payment clears and the guy sends it, I'll probably be out of the country! 🙁 I'll have something nice to come back to though :)
 
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