SCSI vs Sata

Currently I have the sata drives listed in my sig. I am thinking about going to SCSI, is there much of a difference with sata vs SCSI? What specs should I look for that will make a difference vs my sata drives?

SATA is generally slower then SCSI. SATA comes in 7,200 RPM and 10,000 RPM (Raptor) varients. The 7,200 RPM versions are not any faster then there IDE counterparts. The Raptor is currently the only 10,000 RPM SATA drive and although i have never used one I hear they are pretty fast. SCSI is generally intended for the server market or high end desktop systems. SCSI is faster then SATA. Most drives come in 10,000 and 15,000 RPM varients.

A 15,000 RPM SCSI drive will make a noticable difference on your system as opposed to the 80 gb drives you have. Even a 74 GB raptor will make a difference.

I migrated from 7200rpm drives in raid to raptors and now to scsi. There is a huge difference between 7200rpm drives and 10000 rpm drives. In honesty upgrading to 15000rpm scsi is not worth the money it costs (unless you can get a deal... like I did). To buy a retail 15000rpm scsi drive of a decent size (74gb) you are looking at $500 US plus scsi controller and cable (which isnt cheap). Id only go scsi if you can get it cheap(ish) or have money to blow.

Performance wise, there is a difference, but it comes down to if its really worth spending all that money for a millisecond improvement in access times.

I'm going to disagree on your answer cooter to SATA 7200rpm drives not been as fast as there UDMA counterparts. When I built my PC last year in march I was using a new Maxtor 80gb UDMA133 8mb Drive and I can safely say it was crap.

My games where slow at loading for example C&C Generals took 5 mins to load 1 single player level. We're as on this SATA drive 2 mins flat and thats a fact on that maxtor drive I defragged it everytime I installed something that used large amounts of disk space. And at the time I was only using 512mb PC2700 memory I was when I first got my SATA drive and loading times still where faster.

So no I'm sorry I think investing my SATA drive is on of the best things I've done to my PC for performance wise.

You're confusing terms here AngelfireUK,

UDMA = Ultra Direct Memory Access, a data transfer mode
ATA = AT Attachment
PATA = Parallel ATA, the older kind on ribbon cables
SATA = Serial ATA, the newer kind

Both SATA and PATA drives uses UDMA. There are negligible speed differences between comparable PATA and SATA drives if they are both using the same transfer mode (ie: UDMA mode 6).

If there was that much of a difference between load times there must have been something not configured correctly on your computer.

SCSI = Small Computer Systems Interface, very different from ATA.