FASTEST SETUP PERIOD 15,000rpm scsi or 10,000 SATA?

[tirez]

Also: Who said anything about PCI-X?.... blah old hat... get PCI-E and get way better performance.

TiReZ

You won't see better performance because you won't be saturating your PCI-X except with maybe some benches. A good PCI-X card with lots of RAM will give you all the speed you need until the SSDs are available.

True, only burst speed would be affected in a single drive scenario, but you guys were talking about RAIDing a bunch of drives, where PCI-E would be better than PCI-X. Also what makes you think it would be cheaper to buy a PCI-X card, due to the fact that maybe only one or two old desktop boards even have PCI-X, you are getting into workstation boards here. PCI-E is faster than PCI-X and is available on desktop boards now.

 

[tirez]

Great you know binary math, but the point is started above. SCSI is a more intrusive setup. Not just drop and go, supported hardware and excessive cooling is needed, as well as some type of 80pin to 68 pin converter. Don't assume every post has a one dimensional meaning.

Intrusive? How?
Excessive cooling? Why would 12.5 watts of active power dissipation in the Raptor be much worse than 21.8 watts in the Atlas 15kv2. Or the Cheetah 15k.5s 17.5 watts. Keep in mind you only need one to beat two raptors in raid 0.

And buy the proper drive for the controller and you don't need to use an adapter.

TiReZ
Again your missing the point, clearly ready one thing and assuming nothing related to the topic.
SCSI drives need to be actively cooled. I don't care who says otherwise, but standard cooling with 15k SCSI drivers is no sufficient at all. And you have it backwards the SCSI takes more powers and produces x2 the amount of heat. Again read before you post.

Most consumer cases already have cooling for the hard drive rack.
My numbers from that post were taken from storage review.

Besides, you were talking about raiding 2-4 drives together... I guess you dont think it would consume more power, produce more heat, or be more intrusive than a single fast drive. And still the single SCSI drive would have better Access Time.

If you have an SCA controller, buy an SCA drive. If you have a Ultra 320 controller buy a 68 pin drive. I have no problem with that.

 

[PCcashCow]

Great you know binary math, but the point is started above. SCSI is a more intrusive setup. Not just drop and go, supported hardware and excessive cooling is needed, as well as some type of 80pin to 68 pin converter. Don't assume every post has a one dimensional meaning.

Intrusive? How?
Excessive cooling? Why would 12.5 watts of active power dissipation in the Raptor be much worse than 21.8 watts in the Atlas 15kv2. Or the Cheetah 15k.5s 17.5 watts. Keep in mind you only need one to beat two raptors in raid 0.

And buy the proper drive for the controller and you don't need to use an adapter.

TiReZ
Again your missing the point, clearly ready one thing and assuming nothing related to the topic.
SCSI drives need to be actively cooled. I don't care who says otherwise, but standard cooling with 15k SCSI drivers is no sufficient at all. And you have it backwards the SCSI takes more powers and produces x2 the amount of heat. Again read before you post.

Most consumer cases already have cooling for the hard drive rack.
My numbers from that post were taken from storage review.

Besides, you were talking about raiding 2-4 drives together... I guess you dont think it would consume more power, produce more heat, or be more intrusive than a single fast drive. And still the single SCSI drive would have better Access Time.

If you have an SCA controller, buy an SCA drive. If you have a Ultra 320 controller buy a 68 pin drive. I have no problem with that.
I'm all twisted now. SCSI drives do consume more power, produce more heat, and are intrusive. I didn't say otherwise. Your right SCSI drives do have better access-times, never said otherwise as well. As far as SCA cards go, don't think that's an option. SCA refers to the hot-swap interface the drives uses. Getting 68pin drives is the best way to go, but I thought the drives he had access to were free and just needed to get the card, so he would only need to SCA to 68pin power converter.

 

[djgandy]

IMO all drives should be cooled.
One of my IDE's started playing up, stuck coolers on it and saw a 30C temperature drop.
HDD coolers are very cheap anyway, and will make your drive last a lot a longer.

And just get a good PCI card. Yes the interface is "slow" but the drive is the limit tbh.

 

[Nedkt]

Also: Who said anything about PCI-X?.... blah old hat... get PCI-E and get way better performance.

TiReZ

You won't see better performance because you won't be saturating your PCI-X except with maybe some benches. A good PCI-X card with lots of RAM will give you all the speed you need until the SSDs are available.

True, only burst speed would be affected in a single drive scenario, but you guys were talking about RAIDing a bunch of drives, where PCI-E would be better than PCI-X. Also what makes you think it would be cheaper to buy a PCI-X card, due to the fact that maybe only one or two old desktop boards even have PCI-X, you are getting into workstation boards here. PCI-E is faster than PCI-X and is available on desktop boards now.

Even in RAID you won't saturate a PCI-X except in benchmarks. In home use, a PCI-e will give no noticeable improvment over PCI-X, unless you are into showing off HDTach numbers.

I happen to have the latest ASUS board (as in just released a couple months ago) that includes 2 PCI-x slots. It's also one of the more popular higher-end overclocking boards out now.

I'm not disputing the practicality of getting a PCI-e controller card, I agree that is the better choice moving forward, but its not really for performance reasons that you should make that move.

 

[PCcashCow]

I agree, but HDtach database if off on the interface they use. There are so many inconsistencies with what interface they are benching.

 

[Nedkt]

I agree, but HDtach database if off on the interface they use. There are so many inconsistencies with what interface they are benching.

Yeah, I was just throwing out a benchmark example. Insert any bench of your choice.

 

[lb19984]

ok so this is what i am down to...
1. i will only get scsi if i get a server board (i have two AMD operon's @ 2.6ghz (single core) (if i stilck with a desktop board i will have to buy a $600 pci-x raid controller)
2. get the updated raptor... (now i have the 8mb version) id get the 16mb 74gb one
3. im intereseted in that solid state drive thing... i think it might be the best solution for my situation.. beacause i need relatively a small amount of space.. just for the OS... i guess i could do without 3 Os's and just go with vista...
but i iwill keep u guys posted...
and the drives that i can get two of either
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822332019
or the 320 gb version which they dont have on newegg
thanks again

 

[PCcashCow]

You could go with a Asus M2N32 WS Professional nForce 590 SLI, you use a nice price dual core AM2 and get a simple two channel PCI-X card. Single channel Adaptec 29320alpr cards are around 100 bucks on the net used if you want that option. The board is very solid and could support just about any combination you'd like. You won't spend 600 bucks this way, but you'll come close getting your ram and video configured. I think we are all interested in ssd's but it just not there yet.

 

[balister]

That's the thing. You just plug in SATA and go. It's as simple as pie. Then you set up your raid array in the built-in controller, and you're ready to go. Consumer-level hardware is normally much easier to configure, albeit sometimes slightly less powerful. This is the case here.

Quite true, but the starter of the thread asked was what is fastest. SCSI u320 is the clear winner.

TiReZ

It's not that clear cut Tirez. It depends on the number of drives that he wants to read/write to at one time. If the plan is to stripe 3 or more drives together, SAS will beat U320 because SAS does 300 MB/s to each drive while U320 does 640 MB/s to the bus which is shared by all the drives. In effect, you max out at 640 MB/s on U320 while SAS doesn't max out till 3 GB/s on one channel (10 drives all being read/written to). So overall, SCSI will be faster than SATA, but it depends on how many drives he's going to be reading/writing to at one time, if it's 3 or more, SAS beats U320, if it's only 1 or 2, then U320 beats SAS.

 

[Nedkt]

ok so this is what i am down to...
1. i will only get scsi if i get a server board (i have two AMD operon's @ 2.6ghz (single core) (if i stilck with a desktop board i will have to buy a $600 pci-x raid controller)

Get the ASUS workstation board, an Areca PCI-X sata raid controller (about $300) and some raptors. That would be the best bang for your buck by far, assuming you convince yourself you need the RAID.

 

[djgandy]

ok so this is what i am down to...
1. i will only get scsi if i get a server board (i have two AMD operon's @ 2.6ghz (single core) (if i stilck with a desktop board i will have to buy a $600 pci-x raid controller)
2. get the updated raptor... (now i have the 8mb version) id get the 16mb 74gb one
3. im intereseted in that solid state drive thing... i think it might be the best solution for my situation.. beacause i need relatively a small amount of space.. just for the OS... i guess i could do without 3 Os's and just go with vista...
but i iwill keep u guys posted...
and the drives that i can get two of either
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822332019
or the 320 gb version which they dont have on newegg
thanks again

Just get a PCI scsi card for cheap. Seriously, the slowest part of any system is the hard drives. It'll still be faster than raptors.

 

[sc10000]

I went with the Asus P5W DH Deluxe board, 2 x raptor 150 oem, no clear case (raid 1 using onboard chip), and 4 x seagate 7200.10 perpindicular 500gb (raid 5, adaptec 2830sa pci-e; card also does raid 6, 50, 60, etc.).

Thought about raptors in raid 0, but theres no point; raid 1 will definetly up the read speed & thats all you need for games, etc. The raid 5 array will be used for backups & archiving. That particular adaptec card has 256mb cache, 8 channels & scales up to 512tb...whoa. Fyi, also dropping in an 8800gtx + physics card and 4gb corsair xms2. That should be reasonably fast. Hopefully fast enough to run fsx at full res, but I doubt it. 8O

 

[Whizzard9992]

ok so this is what i am down to...
1. i will only get scsi if i get a server board (i have two AMD operon's @ 2.6ghz (single core) (if i stilck with a desktop board i will have to buy a $600 pci-x raid controller)
2. get the updated raptor... (now i have the 8mb version) id get the 16mb 74gb one
3. im intereseted in that solid state drive thing... i think it might be the best solution for my situation.. beacause i need relatively a small amount of space.. just for the OS... i guess i could do without 3 Os's and just go with vista...
but i iwill keep u guys posted...
and the drives that i can get two of either
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822332019
or the 320 gb version which they dont have on newegg
thanks again

If you go SCSI, go 15k, otherise the Ratpors are a better buy.

If you don't consider cost, 15K SCSI is better than a 10K raptor. There's no argument to that. There's a much faster seek time and a much faster transfer rate. You can juggle SCSI, RAID, and PCI types around all you want, but apples to apples, 15K SCSI drives are faster than than the Raptors.

The I-RAM drives are nice, if you can live with the storage limitations. I can't say much for their reliability. All i can say is don't underestimate M$'s greed when it comes to system resources.

If you're looking for speed, might I recommend:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822111145

75GB in RAID 0 would be MORE than enough. Cheetas will always treat you well. At $400 for two, you can't go wrong. Of course, you need a nice U320 card.....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816103017

$270 for a nice adaptec in PXI-X.

That's $700 for a 15K SCSI setup @ 75GB versus about $300 for a 10k Raptor setup @ ~150GB.

If you don't mind eating the $400 difference, the SCSI will treat you much better in all areas, except silence.