SCSI worth it?

I am planning for my new computer and was wondering how Well SCSI hard drives perform compared to ATA.

You can get a SEAGATE 18GB 15,000RPM MODEL for around $200, now if it is as fast as I think then it would be worth it to install OS and games on and such. Anyone have or know anything about it?

in a word, no

While something like a 15k SCSI drive is a tad quicker than the best IDE drives, the difference is minimal these days. Cheetah's produce prodigous spin noise, lots of seek noise, and tons of heat. Modern IDE drives like the WD 8mb buffer SE series offer nearly all the application performance of these drives, and a lot more storage to boot. And don't even get me started on Seagate... I discontinued using their products long ago as they are a ticking time bomb. The Seagate SCSI units ought to come with a RMA pre-issued, as virtually every one I've ever sold quit within two years of installation.

I realize there are users out there who swear by Seagate, but understand this is the product of experience with a very limited number of drives. I have sold thousands upon thousands of drives in the last decade, I instead swear at Seagate.

I'll second what Larva said. The thoughtput performance of SCSI is slight compared to the higher price. (And remember that the cost of the drive is only a small part of it. You'll need a controller, and an Adaptec SCSI 160 card goes for $185 at Newegg.)


BHD

For a single-user system it is hard to justify SCSI any more. Not
only are the drives more expensive, but you have to add the cost
of the controller, too.

The wild card on the horizon is SATA--Serial ATA. This may well
change everything. There are a few Mboards and controllers
out now and a flood of them by next year. IF is all works out
SCSI could be dead.

SCSI will never die!! Long live SCSI!!

SCSI Ultra 320 (the newest standard that has been approved) has a max throughput of 320mb/sec. Serial ATA has a max theoretical throughput of 150mb/sec. Plus, SCSI has the ability for peripherials to talk to one another without using any of the motherboard resources.

Regardless of what they tell you, you still can't match the performance of a SCSI bus with any of the other solotions currently available.

That being said, SCSI will cost you. About $200 for a decent 36gig HD, and about 4-5 times the cost of any IDE device you want to put on the SCSI bus. Plus the cost of a controller card.

Honestly for a single user, unless money is no object to you, scsi is probably to expensive these days, when compared to the other options that are out there.

But I would recommend that you do your own research. Search google.com for scsi. You will find a plethura of knowledge to search through.

My A+ instructor was very pro SCSI, and very anti IDE drives. He made a good point about the longevity of most SCSI drives versus the longevity of most IDE drives. In business applications where the value of the data can easily be worth more than the computer, I think this has more weight than with a home user who has MP3's and such.
And there is also the issue of how fast the market changes. Do you want to buy a drive that will last for several years of hard use, when it will be obsolete in less than one?
And I also think that the reliability of IDE drives is improving.

the theoretical doesn't tell the whole story

With transfer rates provided by the fastest disk drives available hovering in the 50-75MB/s range (and this is on the outermost tracks only, inner tracks will show roughly half this amount) SCSI's 320MB/s transfer rate is no advantage over even UDMA100 in terms of application performance. It matters not whether you pour water with a teaspoon through a hole a foot around, or one 3 feet around. The size of the hole was never your limiting factor.

SCSI does handle multiple users better, but of course most of us are designing systems for ourselves. The real reason why SCSI drives still show (an ever lessening) speed advantage is that the drive manufacturers only make their fasted drives with SCSI interfaces. If you had an equivalent 15k IDE drive to compare, you would find the SCSI version has nothing to offer the desktop users, even if given 3.2 times the interface speed. Of course such a theoretical IDE drive would cost just as much as its SCSI counterpart, which is why IDE drives focus on the cost effective rather than the cutting edge technologies. You would still save the cost of the SCSI controller, preserving most of the IDE cost advantage.

The real question is do you need more than what drives like the 8MB WD IDE units provide. If your primary focus is video or sound editing, you might. The way to get this is to go IDE RAID. It will still cost less than competing (single drive) SCSI alternatives, and outperform them.

While personal investigation is always a good thing, searching google will also bring a plethora of out of date or simply incorrect information on subjects like this. www.storagereview.com and www.xbitlabs.com would be my recommendations for more pertinent (and correct) information on the choices the market presents you.

simply untrue

repo man11 said:

My A+ instructor was very pro SCSI, and very anti IDE drives. He made a good point about the longevity of most SCSI drives versus the longevity of most IDE drives. In business applications where the value of the data can easily be worth more than the computer, I think this has more weight than with a home user who has MP3's and such.

Click to expand...

This is not in any way true. Due to the higher spin rates typically encountered in SCSI drives (especially ones capable of outperforming IDE drives) significantly higher heat is produced and failure rates are astronomical. If SCSI drives did not typically come with 5 year warranties (one of the things the extra money buys you), no one would buy them. Rarely will one run more than two years before failing.

If businesses don't realize (as all computer users should) that hard drives fail and have a realistic and implemented backup system drive choice simply doesn't matter. Drives fail... all of them. SCSI drives fail faster.

A friend of mine that works in a video production house as an editor uses large arrays of SCSI disks daily. I don't recall the exact number of drives utilized, but it is around 70. Rarely a month goes by where a drive failure (or many) is not encountered. Virtually every single one of the SCSI drives I have bought for personal use and those I have sold have failed well before their usefulness has passed.

Boy, I bet you and he could have a lively debate about that one!
I'm not going to argue, I have zero experience with SCSI drives. I was willing to take his word for it because of that. Whether they are or not, I still think it doesn't matter to me, I know that if I stick with quality IDE drives, they'll generally last until I'm ready to replace them with something faster.
The real breakthrough will bewhen we no longer have to have a mechanical disk for storage. That will be a huge improvement in speed and reliability.

A much cheaper option than SCSI is to get an IDE raid setup in raid 0. It will also outperform SCSI unless your SCSI is in a raid setup... which will cost about $200 more than a REGULAR scsi setup!
IDE raid is a good choice.

SCSI has advantages but also costs.

The main benefit I see is reduced host CPU/RAM usage.

Also, some SCSI controllers can use 64bit/64MHz slots, so the PCI bus isnt such a limit.

David

All drives do fail, I am not going to argue that point. Whether or not SCSI drives fail faster than their IDE counterparts is also pointless for me to argue. I've owned a WD caviar 6 gig HD that lasted since 1998 and didn't fail until lightning struck the line right outside the house, and that will fry any system. I haven't owned a scsi system that long. My seagate cheatah has run reliably now for 1 1/2 years. All harddrives will fail eventually. Do IDE or SCSI last longer? I think that how long each drive lasts depends more on the quality of the drive than what kind of interface is used.

Which is faster? SCSI wins. At least some scsi. It may not be by much. Even against your 8mb cache WD (which seems to be the only IDE Hard drive even remotely in the same speed class as any scsi Hard drive) as the following article on Tom's Hardware guide will attest to.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q2/020415/index.html

Also, there is an article discussing the benefits of Serial ATA here

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q3/020812/index.html

But this issue of speed, which scsi does in fact seem to win in most cases, leaves out the biggest benefit of scsi. As David points out, reduced CPU and RAM usage.

As far as doing research, yes, a search on google will get you some outdated and inaccurate information. The most up to date and accurate information on SCSI is available from www.scsita.org

In the end the question of whether or not to go scsi comes down to money. Most people I know would go scsi if money were no object. But this is rarely the case. So you have to ask yourself if the extra $350 to $500 is worth what in some cases is only a 10%-25% increase in performance. Most people have to say no to scsi. When serial ATA has come to some maturaty and is in fact outperforming current IDE technology I may myself go with the Serial ATA box. But for now, I will enjoy the performance enhancements, however slight, of my scsi system.

The Temps and noise on the new Cheetahs are equal or less to that of current IDE drives. What I am wondering is exactly how much a diffrence a 15k 8MG cache Cheetah would have over the WD 8MG cahche 7200rpm model.

one more supposed scsi virtue falls

I've read the review you posted a link to from tom's about the 15K drive. Here is one of the test results published there.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q2/020415/index-06.html

You may have to press the refresh button to see the graph.

At one time SCSI did offer better CPU utiliztion properties than IDE drives, but this is no longer the case. Given that http://www.scsita.org/ is the scsi trade organization, a consortium of scsi product manufacturers, do not expect the information presented there to show the areas in wich IDE drives compare favorably. It is not an impartial source. www.storagereview.com is an impartial testing organization that evaluates scsi and ide drives via the same testing regimin.