To go SCSI or not to go SCSI?

[Guest]

I am planning on building a high end machine now I am not rich or anything and have tons of money to blow but I am saving up to have one good system.. So my question is to all of you people that are smarter then me (I hope!) is what is your view on SCSI vs IDE? Is the gain in speed noticable? Is it worth the extra money or should I just stick with IDE? Also if I go SCSI what is a good SCSI card to go with and if I do my hard drive SCSI should I do my CD-R SCSI and CD-DVD player SCSI to? How far should I go?

Thanks in advance,
-Xanith

 

[Guest]

Scuzzy is faster, but to what end, what are you going to be doing with it?, do you run Lightwave and 3D Studio max and do a lot of Graphics and animations, Will you install a video capture card and do video editing and manipulation, Will you have Photoshop and Corel Draw 10 and do image creation and publishing, If the answer is no to these questions then you probably dont need to go to the expense of a Scuzzy sys, and a good cpu and board with a 7200rpm hdd will work just as well.

 

[Guest]

I don't know if I'm any smarter but I'll share my experience...

If you can afford it then I would say go SCSI, it's never "wrong". If you'll notice any difference highly depends on what you're going to use your machine for.
As well as what drives you go for of course...

Additional benefitts, besides higher transfer rates etc, is that SCSI is suppose to reduce the load of the CPU in disk related operations.

Besides, like myself, I feel comfort in having the best. Even if I doesn't necissarely need it...

I like Adaptec, they've never failed me. But I don't think you'll notice any performance difference between the brands on a desktop.

I'm using Adaptec 19160 along with my Seagate X15 and Plextor 40Max.


Regards!

/J

AMD TBIRD 1.33
Asus A7M266
Vapochill
nVida Geoforce3
Apacer 256MB DDR266
Seagate X15

 

[Guest]

I often hear people scoff at SCSI as too much power for home use. I've had SCSI systems for the past 5 years or so, and I'd have to say the main benefit that I find is load times, especially for games. This is not just a consequence of SCSI itself, but also because SCSI drives can be much faster.

I have also found a few secondary benefits:
>> ease in adding new components to the SCSI subsystem-- I have 3 drives, a tape backup, a CD-ROM, and a scanner; I've got room for another half-dozen
>> smoother multi-process operation-- lots of disk activity doesn't bog the system down

Having said that, those fast drives and subsystem will cost you. A top-of-the-line SCSI adapter will cost ~$300, and a 36GB drive at 7200 rpm will cost you ~$500. Compare this to ATA where no adapter is needed, and you can get an 80GB 7200 rpm IDE drive for less than $300!

So even though SCSI has gotten faster and better, so has IDE. It's just that IDE prices also got better much faster: $3.5/GB IDE vs $13/GB SCSI in the example above.

Thus I'd recommend SCSI only if you intend to be a super power user, not just a power user. It will be easier to add more drives or other components, and you'll appreciate the snappy load times. Your system won't bog down as easily if you try to do something like webhosting or gamehosting on your DSL. Otherwise, save your extra $500 and buy a GeForce3 card and a few games instead. (Doesn't everybody play Quake Arena?)

--dv

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