• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

SCSI is it really worth it??

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

Cisco Kid

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 13, 2001
Just wondering, if one plans to upgrade drives and will have 2 systems at home is scsi worth it as far as going to 2 smaller drives in a raid 0 or 1 format?

I know scsi is more $$$ noticeably more but is the performance a huge increase over IDE. I have been told it is. Would I benefit if I plan to get into DV editing, cause I have a real interest in learning more about it!

Also what about USB 2.0 drives, they seem to be a good deal for larger space but is it good technology, anyone got feedback l;et me hear it or provide links

Cisco KId
 
Last edited:
well scsi is a vast improvement from IDE depending on what scsi controller you intend to purchase and what IDE technology is being compared to.

The older Scsi controller will not compare to the new IDE ATA133 standard but any Adaptec Ultra 160 and ovre will easily out perform a IDE ATA133 although they do cost alot of money.

Please remeber that Scsi hdd are also better quality drives and spin at 15k rpm allowing for better seek times then any IDE hdd's that run at 7200 rpm.

You may want to hold of on the scsi and consider that the new IDE SATA has come out and is a new and promising technoloy that could one day best SCSI.

As for USB 2.0 i wouldn't really trust it all that much for mass storage for i have had problems with it in the past.
 
USB drives are slow. Unless you want portablity, there is no reason to have them.

I love SCSI. I like the way they are setup and that I can connect 15 devices to one cable. They do perform better than IDE.

That being said, the latest IDE drives are close in performance and the price of going SCSI is usually not worth the performance gain for just one or two drives. In most cases I would recomend a good IDE drive, like a 7200 ATA100 Seagate.
 
My external firewire drive zooms! :burn: However I have a PCI firewire controller card (less CPU utalization?).

I've got to disagree with you WildArmsSX. The performance bump you get from U160 is not that great on a desktop, even playing games or regular home desktop applications. Where you may get a performance advantage is doing DV, Photoshop, or in a server. Plus, you're talking a SERIOUS bump in $$ for a good controller and a decent-sized hard dirve. $400 for one 36 gig drive and another $200 for a controller card. That's pretty steep in my estimation. You don't even get hardware RAID for that price. Too rich for my blood. Now the more cost effective solution in my book is a couple of 80gb wd 8mb jb's and a promise ide controller pushing raid 0. That's $250. You've got great performance, and $350 less. That's a nice chunk of change.

However if you do want a SCSI raid setup :drool: get this:
http://65.119.30.174/productimage/16-100-002-04.JPG
(mylex entry level hardware raid controller) ($350) and a couple of those 36 gb 15k rpm jobbers (2x$400) and you've got a pretty amazing setup. Of course you want to get a boot drive as well, so that's another $400. Can you see how SCSI adds up?
 
I have bought top-of-the line scsi drives in the past for my personal machine. I have no plan to ever repeat what I consider was a mistake (money not well spent). I use SCSI 160 all the time professionally and am very familiar with performance of SCSI vs ATA in RAID configurations of many different flavors. My advice is that if cost is really any consideration at all, get the ATA drives instead of scsi.

Dave
 
personaly i have allways steered clear of scsi for two reasons

sounds very complicated to set up compared to ide

also ive seen some people have trouble with it when they hose there system and need drivers

its always seemed much more cost effective to just go with raid in ide

and regular ide does me just fine

i would wate for serial ide to mature a little bit they are sposed to have some smoken speads
 
crash893 said:
personaly i have allways steered clear of scsi for two reasons

sounds very complicated to set up compared to ide

also ive seen some people have trouble with it when they hose there system and need drivers

its always seemed much more cost effective to just go with raid in ide

and regular ide does me just fine

i would wate for serial ide to mature a little bit they are sposed to have some smoken speads

ok, first of all it is very easy to set-up, infact you don't actually need to do anything. just put the scsi controller in connect it to the scsi drive and you're set. Drivers are installed in Windows XP straight away usually.
If people hose their system with it then they certainly don't know what they're doing.
the downsides to scsi is that it is very expensive, makes quite a lot of noise (some drives are 15krpm after all) and it works very badly in Windows XP a lot of the time (very low write speeds look at huge thread in storagereview.com)
Overall for the price it is better getting IDE unless you are frequently doing video/graphics editing or are hosting a big server.
 
One more thing to add is that SCSI is VERY finnicky with high FSB, they usually start to crap out at around 37Mhz on the PCI bus. This should be rectified with the 1:1 divider of the PCI bus on the nForce2 boards:D
 
I personally like scsi, but then again I had a 10k drive for my first scsi test. But now that I am building a 9 disk array, Im excited to see what I can get out of that.
 
I love SCSI, actually all the drives in my machine are SCSI, SCSI hdd, dvd, cd,...

It's awsome when you want to do many thing at the same time, for example,

downloading a big file, hosting ftp, burning cd, playing Age of Mythology , ALL at the same time and no laging amost them at all,


and you know when you insert a CD with the auto play on, an IDE CDROM drive would give you about 1-3 seconds "freeze" brfore the screeen pop up but it doesn't happen in my SCSC system, one word , smooth..
 
seems to be a tough call, I could go scsi but I would have to go with one drive and it would be half the size I have now:(

I think I will try to get another Maxtor 60 gig ata 133 and pair it with my current 60 gig maxtor and go raid 0, seems to be the cheapest route or I may sell my drive and look for 2 - 40 giggers with 8 mb cache

Are there 40 gig 8 mb cache drives out now??

Cisco KId
 
I've got a adaptec 29160 (64bit bus), a 4x compro burner and a 18,4GB Quantum Atlas III disk... I did some tests on the disk comparing to my baracudaIII 40gb (5200rpm)... and it was nice, a divx took about 1½ minute to copy on the Atlas, but around 7 on the cuda...

I havent got ANY trouble installing and setting up the scsi-id's... Just check the manual/readme. The burner works smooth, runned it on a adaptec 2902 (10mb/s :p) card, and it has always worked, no funny business at all.

The major problem is that the Atlas is noisy... Not noisy as in compared with another disk, but as compared to my old turbo overclocked dishwasher... So I've dispabled it temponarily, and I think I'm going to ditch it and buy a nice and new one instead.
 
Johnny Knoxville said:


ok, first of all it is very easy to set-up, infact you don't actually need to do anything. just put the scsi controller in connect it to the scsi drive and you're set. Drivers are installed in Windows XP straight away usually.
If people hose their system with it then they certainly don't know what they're doing.
the downsides to scsi is that it is very expensive, makes quite a lot of noise (some drives are 15krpm after all) and it works very badly in Windows XP a lot of the time (very low write speeds look at huge thread in storagereview.com)
Overall for the price it is better getting IDE unless you are frequently doing video/graphics editing or are hosting a big server.

true the scsi is much easyier than it used to be i am some what predjudce agenst it becuase of experinces with it way back when

however as you stated its still expensive and im still unclear on the scsi types

also for me scsi has never been greatly avalable
i have never seen a scsi dvd i have one old scsi cdrom but i am always afraid ill toast soemthing and cant just run to a shop and get it.

also nearlly all mother boards come with ide on them provideing one less thing to break
 
Yeah, SCSI = bad for overclocking.

The reason it's so much faster is because of drive technology, not the interface. Sure, the interface is faster than ATA100, but even a U160 drive can't fill an ATA100 bus. SCSI drives are more advanced mechanically than ATA drives by a generation or two and they always have been. 7200 SCSI drives existed back before 5400 ATA was even released. We haven't heard anything about an ATA jump to 10,000RPM but SCSI is aready at 15,000. Higher RPMs = lower seek times, which = the biggest performance increase. Seek times are everything. Rarely is a sustained transfer rate exercised in a desktop PC application.

ATA all the way. (BTW I love SCSI and my P3 Xeon system is all-SCSI)
 
True, unless if the motherboard like P4PE that support fixed PCI/ACP ratio, a lot of good mobo nowadays support that,


Crash, I bought my Toshbia SCSI 16X DVD drive about 2 years ago, I paid like $120 for it, just about 30-40% more than the pinoneer 16X IDE at that time

but it works great, feels like it will last for a long.. time, I believe that the build quality of SCSI devices are just better,
 
FuzzyNY said:

Crash, I bought my Toshbia SCSI 16X DVD drive about 2 years ago, I paid like $120 for it, just about 30-40% more than the pinoneer 16X IDE at that time
you bought a 16x DVD-rom two years ago? are you sure? :D. i think you mean 2 months ago maybe
 
yep I have decided to stay IDE and go raid 0, is WD the best option for 8mb cache drives at this time, and are they available in 40 gig size?

cisco kid
 
hm... I can't tell exactly how long... maybe not two years but definely more than 1 year for sure, .. it was about the same time when the first plextor IDE 12X burner came out...
 
Back