RAID and SCSI

[allgoodpeople]

I have read (though have never had experience with) about using SCSI HDD vs. IDE HDD, and the supposed performance increases. My question is three fold:

1) Do SCSI drives really outperform IDE drives by all that much (ie enough to make it worth the expense of a SCSI card and cables and the issues of setting them up)?

2) If so, can you arrange SCSI drives in RAID 0?

3) If you can arrange SCSI drives in RAID 0, how would you go about it? I know what RAID is and how it works, but have zero experience setting them up.

Thanks for any info.

allgoodpeople



"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing milkbone underwear."

 

[Guest]

Here are some answers

1- Equally configured drives usually perform on par, but scsi drives can be purchased with higher spindle speeds (15K rpm) and with larger cache (upwards of 8MB on one drive). The advantage of scsi shows itself when many drives are installed, and disk intensive tasks are being performed - scsi drives are controlled by the scsi controller (freeing up the cpu), while ide drives are controlled by the cpu (bogging down the cpu). Also, scsi drives are smarter, in that they can rearrange the order in which requests are serviced, depending on where the head is in respect to where the data requested is.

2- Yes. you can also use raid 1, 1+0, 5, plus some less used formats.

3- buy a raid controller (very expensive!), then use the configuration tool available on bootup, just like the ide varieties.

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I have not yet begun to procrastinate.

 

[Guest]

All of what Bartleby says is true and more. Also you can have more than 2 SCSI drives on the same controler channel without taking a performence hit like you will with the ATA interface. The SCSI drives out now have a 160MB/sec interface and there are even a few new ones that have a 320MB/sec interface but wait, there's more! The limit of the bus length for the SCSI bus is 12 meters if you have an LVD SCSI bus and more than one drive on it (read that one as my box is full of drives and I need to put the drives outside in another box), far fetched I know but a nice option anyway. You can hang 15 devices on the SCSI bus as well.

ATA is cheap for what you get though. (Trying to be fair and ballanced is very hard when you are talking SCSI to ATA.)

Mike

 

[dhlucke]

a lot of the new MB have scsi and raid controllers. Is it worth it? Who really takes advantage of it, or is an ultra100 7200rpm harddrive good enough for gaming and photoshop...??

 

[Guest]

For the general Gamer I recomend ATA, it's much cheaper than SCSI and will do the trick until you realy begin to tap your computer for some real work, at that point SCSI might be the better option. I don't like the SCSI embeded in the MB though it is generaly much much cheaper that way, sometimes you can get the MB with the SCSI controler for much less than the SCSI card alone.

Mike