ata133 or scsi 160

[71skylark]

The scsi costs way more so I can only afford 2 15k RPM drives for the raid 0 setup, while I could buy 4 7200rpm IDE drives for that raid setup. Which is the better option?

[Yodums]

Depends if you dont utilize a whole lot of space and run some very quick stuff than the SCSI if not than the 4 IDE's would be good since that would be lots of space :)

[71skylark]

Speed is my goal. What is faster, 4 7200rpm ata133s in raid 0 or two 15000rpm ultra160s in raid 0?

[Yodums]

Originally posted by 71skylark
Speed is my goal. What is faster, 4 7200rpm ata133s in raid 0 or two 15000rpm ultra160s in raid 0?

SCSI...

[Jon]

Unless you're using a motherboard that has the PCI66 specification neither of them are going to be able to get past the 133MBps burst rate that a normal 33MHz PCI bus can give.

In order to get actual Ultra 160 SCSI speeds you're going to need a motherboard that supports the PCI66 spec and a controller that fits it.

Otherwise, if both are on a normal 33MHz bus, I doubt very seriously you are going to see much real world difference between either. SCSI has better seek times but this goes unnoticed for the most part in just ordinary use. If you decide SCSI RAID over the proposed IDE setup I'd say you're going to be slightly disappointed...SCSI is a master at multitasking and this is where it is king. The SCSI RAID setup will be able to hold a higher throughput rate than IDE RAID, but not by much at all on a normal 33MHz bus.

I am also presuming you are not getting a hardware RAID SCSI adapter and are going to be using software RAID that Win2K, NT and XP come equipped with. If so, you are going to be hurting the SCSI setup even more. SCSI hardware RAID adapters are super expensive and I can't justify spending that kind of cash for anything more than a heavily loaded file server.