SCSI vs SATA performance

[gcwebbyuk]

I have the option of installing an Adaptec 29160 SCSI card and 3 Fujitsu MAP3735NP SCSI drives into my pc - or into a secondary case to use as a secondary data store.

How would these drives compare to a SATA drive for performance?

[Mr Alpha]

The 160MB/s of that SCSI interface and the 150/300MB/s of SATA interfaces are both faster than what drives can do so their speed doesn't really matter. The drives themselves are 10k RPM drives, roughly equivalent to a Raptor. Compared to modern 7200 RPM SATA drives the only thing that will give you is the lower seek times of 10k RPM. Although if you stick that card in a normal 32 bit PCI slot the PCI bus would severely limit your throughput.

[gcwebbyuk]

Thanks - you have confirmed what I thought, that the PCI bus would be the bottleneck.

I take it that it is mainly server boards that use 64-bit PCI slots?

This card came out of one of our old servers, along with the disks.

[Mr Alpha]

I take it that it is mainly server boards that use 64-bit PCI slots?
More like it was mainly server boards that used to use 64-bit PCI slots. :)

[gcwebbyuk]

do they no longer support them then?

[Mr Alpha]

64-bit PCI was superseded by PCI-X (PCI-Extended) years ago, and is now being superseded by PCIe (PCI-Express).

[gcwebbyuk]

Am sure some of our recent boards have 64bit PCI slots in them - intel server boards from within a year or so? maybe I am mistaken - it has been known before!

[Mr Alpha]

I think it more likely it was 64-bit PCI-X slots, although the server market can sometimes be really slow to dump old technology so anything is possible.