**Vio1's SCSI Benchmarks and Observations**

[theELVISCERATOR]

Vio1: theELVISCERATOR is running from the ICH5R southbridge, if it's on the system in his sig. 200MB/s bursts are easily possible, since the ICH5R is not PCI 2.0 linked. It does not share bandwidth with the PCI bus. Also, these are burst speed readings that we are referring to. They consist of bursts of data from cache on the drive and are often much higher than disk throughput can be.

This is why vios results with raid have been less successful, he was limited by pci bus speeds.


I take it the long initializing of the scsi card on bootup is not to your liking?

 

[Vio1]

i was hoping that boot up would be even faster... but im content with the operational speed in windows. Its darn fast....

 

[DEZMOND]

Nice benches, I'm kinda new to scsi myself. I'm running a lsi21320r. My load times also seem a bit long,about 6 bars across, but I'm also running 3 controllers.I'm running 2 internal drives and one external with a ide-scsi adapter. So far I really like it.

 

[man_utd]

Your new to it and running 3 controllers? When you get your feet wet, does that mean you dive into lakes?

 

[DEZMOND]

Your new to it and running 3 controllers? When you get your feet wet, does that mean you dive into lakes?

Actually only the one is a scsi controller,the other 2 are ide.I love the high speed external,feels like a regular drive in both benches and real world use.

 

[man_utd]

Ah, still very impressive though. Hopefully I will get my drive in on tuesday and make my forray into scsi.

 

[teezer]

i stuck my 15k fugitsu in a vantec vortex, totally quiet with the rubber mounts plus the digital readout attached to drive ~~~ i wish they would have designed it to have the fan turn on with the system...duh ~~~ these 15k drives need some type of cooling.... forget to turn the fan on, then click and watch it cool down 10C in a minute

mounted mine in the top case slot across the intake psu fan, keeping that hot air out of the mix of the rest of the case airflow

 

[man_utd]

Probably will keep mine down next to normal hdd, and let it burn up, might just reverse air flow to pull, not push.

 

[donny_paycheck]

Very nice setup. Congratulations on finally getting it up and running.

As you know, I have the same thing with the exception of my drive being the Maxtor Atlas 15k, which is just a hair faster than the MAS in a few benchmarks, but about the same in general.

The LSI controller has two virtual controllers that you can see when it scans devices during boot up. You can disable one of these and use only the one with the drive on it if you want, but that doesn't do much for boot time. You can do it by entering the SCSI BIOS setup and messing around with the menus.

As has been said, bootup time is determined largely by how much crap the system has to load/process before you get to the desktop. Network interfaces, antivirus software, and other services will all affect your bootup time drastically.

EDIT: For the drive jumpers, don't bother. They set stuff like on-drive termination for the SCSI bus, spin-up delay, and things that you don't need to change, and don't affect performance unless they're set wrong and keep the drive from working at all.

 

[man_utd]

Ah, thanks for the clearing up. I will probably notice a speed up in boot up, as I am do for a format soon anyway, just got way too much junk on this drive. (I have 4gb left on a 200gb drive)

 

[cooter]

Here are some benchmarks that i did with some SCSI drives in Raid0 and also some IDE drives in both Raid and Single drive setup. The time is in seconds, I did all the tests from a fresh install, no drive images. I did this for real world data, every time I reinstalled I did sp2 most recent drivers and i even did the tests in the same order. Below I have a ZIP file with all the benchmark results. If you have any questions just ask. I am posting this just to add the the SCSI topic.

All of the Benchmark files (Excel, screenshots, and benchmark saved Files)

 

[DEZMOND]

Nice work cooter

 

[Vio1]

awesome... do you have any comparisons between 1 single scsi drive versus raid-0?

 

[cooter]

I currently do not have any comparison on the single SCSI drive verse raid0. I originally had 1 of hte scsi drives in my rig but for the last year it has been in raid. If i get time ill try to run all the tests in single drive configureation to compare, but it will pry not be for about a week. I was also wondering if any of you have load times of these same programs and maps that I could compare with. The maps I tested on are in the excel file. A few things to remember are that on the SCSI test the internet explorer load times are pretty inaccurate cuz i could not start and stop the stopwatch fast enough. Also remember I used adobe acrobat pro, not the reader for the tests.

Vio I am glad to hear that you have converted to SCSI.

 

[Vio1]

im happy with scsi.... however boot ups and shut downs are slower then id like.

Id love to see a comparison of 1 scsi versus 2 in raid-0... cause im thinking of getting a second fujitsu mas3735.

Please do try it out. Im dieing to see the difference.

I'll post later some of my times (using the same tests you did...) however they will be very different cause we have different systems.

 

[man_utd]

Well, I got my drive in today. I ended up buying a fujitsu MAM (thought it was a MAS, late at night) But I am not complaining. Haven't had a chance to mess around with it yet, as I just haven't had a chance to work on it.

 

[eduncan911]

and still slower than two 36s raided but access is quicker....

burst speed less than half

Not slower then my 36 gigabyters:
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=346936

theELVISCERATOR: 172.5mb burst speed is impossible ... the most your computer could do is 150... or is it 120mb? I dont remember.

Correct if using the standard 32bit PCI bus we all know and love (it's around 133MB/s, and I got 129MB in link above).

Incorrect if using 64bit PCI buses (i.e., my previous Ultra320 mobo I had), it goes far beyond that. Servers I've setup with RAID0 spanned across 4 drives in Ultra320 is blazingly fast!

My previous motherboard had dual Ultra320 scsi controllers (dual P4 Xeon mobo). Even though I was using only Ultra160 drives, I wanted more.

Since you're new to scsi, the rule of thumb is this:

SCSI/SCSI2: 20MB/s, SCSI2 allowed bursting to 40MB/s on the bus
U/W: 40MB/s substained, possible burst to 80MB/s (I've personally seen 148MB/s on these, back in 1998!)
Ultra160: 80MB/s substained, possible burst to 160MB/s (I saw ~140MB/s bursting on my previous 7,200rpm drive)
Ultra320: 160MB/s substained, possible burst to 320MB/s

And they are coming out with Serial SCSI later next year, or might be out now for Ultra640 or something like that (haven't kept up with the news lately).

And then there's Optical drives... Do I need to keep going up in burst speeds that are possible?

Looking at your speeds, I'd say yours is rated right about normal. SCSI really shines on RAID in PCI64 bit slots.

Across two channels (each PCI 64bit path to the process/memory is individual, to allow max through-put PER slot!), I've setup several RAID 0, and 0/1 combinations. Putting a drive on one channel, and a 2nd drive on another channel splits the data packet across two true 64 bit paths to each controller. I've seen throughput in Unix across my servers using 4 Ultra320 drives (two on each controller, two controllers) around 420MB/s if I can recall. It was insane! Instant write and read.


Btw, if you went through the expense of Utlra160 why didn't you just get an Utlra320 card? Humm, now that I think about it I don't think they make Utlra320 cards for standard PCI 32bit slots, only 64bit slots.

Should have gotten a controller with write-behind cache. Mucho faster!


After a decade of only using SCSI drives at home, and now I wanted to get into the overclocking world, I decided to dump SCSI and just go SATA. Yes, I can notice a little difference (especially the CPU usage now). But for something less then 1/2 of the cost for RAID0 I'll for these days. Now that SATA RAID is faster then U/W that I was on for many of years... And swore if things are faster then U/W, I'll switch.

So, I went from SCSI after 8 to 10 years of use to SATA. Hey, my pocket book was very happy with this upgrade.

 

[eduncan911]

Since you went through the expense of an add-on card, and HD, let's compare our setups. This is a great thread for comparision!!! I think we have near identicle performance, at almost the same cost. SATA cables are much easier to route and mucho cheaper.

Your setup:
32bit PCI SCSI Controller card: [unknown] most likely around $75
Fujisu 73GB 15,000rpm HD: $343
Ultra160 "round" cable: ~$30 (given, the card may have a cheap flat cable with it)

Total: ~$450 (+ s&h)

SATA "True" RAID (my setup):
Promise SX4 SATA Raid Controller card w/Cache: $130
Samsung PC166 256MB ECC: $22 (you can use any old PC100 SDRAM laying around)
2xWD 36GB Raptors: $100ea (oem)

Total: ~350 (+s&h)


Now that I total things up, I'm liking my setup more and more.

 

[obiwan]

Not sure if it makes any dif but here's mine.
2 74gb rappys in raid0
Asus P5GDC-v
Intel onboard 82801FR

Burst Speed= 226.6 MB/s
Random Access= 8.0 ms
CPU utilization= 4%
Avg Read= 119.8 MB/s

 

[Vio1]

My scsi drive is a 68pin scsi. If i wanted to raid-0 it, could i use another drive like it, but an 80 pin version instead?