IDE to SCSI - - Yes/No ?

[Submit]

Hi,

I have been debating to upgrade my storage to a SCSI interface to quite a while now. I am currently using a WD 120BG (8MB cache). I am considering the Seagate Cheetah 15000 rpm w/ an Adaptec controller. This would be for AMD box 1 under ?My rigs?.

I would get an 18gig drive as that is the size of my windows partition.

What do you guys think?is it worth the money or not?

 

[Smilin]

I just made the transition FROM SCSI to IDE RAID so I'm going to say no.

SCSI is fast --no doubt about that. It's simply not worth the money. The target market is not you and I, it's businesses with $4000 workstations and $20,000 servers. I've been SCSI for years but I finally started hurting for space and needed to upgrade. I just couldn't justify it.

If you put a small amount of $$$ towards getting an IDE raid solution you're going to come very close to the performance you'll get out of putting a ton of $$$ towards SCSI. Yes the SCSI will be a bit faster but you'll have to have a benchmark program to tell the difference...and you certainly won't need a precision scale to tell you your wallet weighs less.

If you have the money not to care then maybe consider this route:
Get an 18 or 36 gig SCSI drive today. Pickup a low end SCSI RAID controller (shy away from adaptec-great stuff but expensive) Run the setup as a regular SCSI setup then add a drive when you can afford it to make the jump to raid... I don't know of anything out there short of an IBM AS/400 DASD drive that will outrun a SCSI Raid 0.

I know this post is starting to ramble, but here's one more option:
Drop another WD120 in there and use software raid 1. You'll get a read-speed boost from the raid1 (need 0 or 5 to get a write-speed boost). It will only cost you the $$ for a new drive and you'll get a speed increase + redundancy for about a 2-3% increase in CPU load.

 

[dullard]

I went the other way, and am quite happy. I went from one machine with SCSI to a newer machine with IDE and the hard drive performance was so much better on the IDE computer. I'm telling you this so you realize that a new fast SCSI drive (which can be faster than any current IDE drive available) won't be the king for very long. 1-2 years down the line an IDE drive will come out with faster performance and significantly larger size for less money. Thus don't think of SCSI as a long term investment. As a short term component, which is worth more: your money or your time that you must wait for HD access? The vast majoriy of people barely use their hard drive and thus cannot justify the price of SCSI. But what about your use as it may be quite atypical? Are you constantly annoyed while waiting for your hard drive? If so, then SCSI may be the right solution for you.

Typical use: Boot computer, load program, never use HD again. In this case SCSI is a huge waste of money.
Atypical use: Boot computer, load HD intensive program, read/write many small files during times where you need the computer to run as fast as possible.

 

[Smilin]

D'oh!
Just checked out the rig you mentioned. Do this:

Partition your 120 gig into a 40 and an 80.
Use the 40 as your primary boot drive for both XP and FreeBSD. Take the 80 gig partition and raid 0 it under windows XP with your other 80 gig drive. They are both 7200 rpm drives with pretty high platter density...you should get pretty close to SCSI performance out of that setup with no cost at all (just a nasty OS reload)

I'm running a Lian-Li with a blue neon kit as well. That blue LED on the Lian-Li cases is kewl. If you ever have video trouble check your fan is spinning on that card. I bought two of those Visiontek Ti500's when they first came out a year ago (one for me and one for my wedding's best-man) and there have been fan problems with both. Great cards otherwise tho

 

[Dug]

I've used both and suggest you stick to IDE.

The long boot times, noise, small size, and cost don't justify it for home use. Server's are a different story.

If there was some way to accurately measure how long it takes to load programs, you wouldn't see much difference if at all.

This is unless you have money to blow, only then would I suggest getting the new 15.3 Seagate.
The performance is amazing.

Amazing equates to about .5sec faster load time.

 

[Submit]

I was under the impression that a high performance SCSI drive like the Cheetah X15 would be significantly faster then any IDE drive. If I would have to get two of the drives and and a SCSI raid controller to notice a significant difference, then the price would outweigh the performance. I think I need to do more research...

Thanks for the posts

 

[alkemyst]

Dullard is right...most ppl have no use for SCSI, nor the 2.0GHz processor they have either

But just like a faster IDE drive will be out soon, so will a faster SCSI.

SCSI allows for many transactions at once, plus a lot better data itegrity. The data is actually structured on the drive differently.

So if high transactions, data integrity, or any combination is critical (note critical in bold, otherwise only if you want to blow money) then SCSI is for you, otherwise that 8MB WD is pretty good

I have SCSI here, but use IDE drives.

 

[Submit]

Smilin,

Can you explain in more detail what are the necessary steps in doing what you are suggesting? Would I need to get an IDE Raid controller?

Edit: I was thinking about having Windows on a fast drive or partition...

Thanks

 

[Pariah]

I think this is another classic case of, if you need someone else to talk you into it, you're probably better off without it. The drive you have now is best of class in the ATA market currently, and there is really no reason for you to spend the money on SCSI unless you do something that would benefit greatly from it.

 

[Markfw]

My .02 is to get another 80 gig and hardware raid controller card. Raid 0 the two 80's and make that your C/boot drive, and load software and OS on it. Put ALL data on the 120 (safety), and if you later want to get another 120, use raid 1 on that with the other 120 as backup/read performance. Cost today ? about $150. Performance ? Killer. After adding another 120 drive ? the best of both worlds data safety and performance.

 

[sitka]

With respect to cost
There is a way to break even with SCSI over the span of a year or so.
If you are privy to or follow the consumer market closely, often a certain series of
drives makes it's way into the base install of a lot of servers sold by the biggies.
By studying the model numbers closely you can buy a mitful of last years most popular
drives at a reduced price, Use them for a while then when you tire of them they will
sell close to what you paid because the early adoptors of that model will want to buy that
series off the "E" to expand their arrays or replace busted ones. Unfortunately you have to reserve youself to
dated speeds and the current IDE drives will be equal or close to dated scsi for consumer use. So what you get left
with is a need to get enough drives and an expensive Raid card to really make your array cook and have fun.
It is great fun and is tough to let your babies go once they serve you well for a while. But sell em at the right time
and it is a wash. Except you get to have a cool scsi box, for a while but you will defiitely find it overkill
unless you put it to work. read this too

 

[dszd0g]

SCSI is not worth the cost for most people.

I went SCSI with my new system and went with a SCSI 15K drive. I originally went with a Tekram DC390U3W since a number of people on the forums recommended it. I was not happy with the performance of the DC390U3W (See why). I ended up swapping a 39160 from one of my older machines with the DC390U3W.

I am quite happy with the Seagate Cheetah 15K drive. It is much quieter than previous SCSI drives I can use, but its seeks are still louder than the IDE drives I own.

I really am a SCSI geek, so just enjoy wasting the money on the minor performance improvement. The benefit of SCSi is only really apparent when you have multiple SCSI devices (other than that it is just the better access time). The true benefit of SCSI is that SCSI devices actually have controller chips on each device and they can talk to each other. The CPU tells device A to copy from block e to block f to device B and lets the devices work it out. With IDE the CPU has to read and write each block itself in PIO mode, and in DMA mode it reads and writes as blocks to and from memory. Most benchmarks won't actually show the multitasking CPU usage benefit of SCSI. However, if you just sit there and wait each time you use the disk, then there will be no benefit for you

 

[Fallengod]

I agree with what everyone else said. Unless you have alot of extra cash you want to dump, an IDE drive by itself or even in raid 0/raid 1 are the best choices. With new 8MB cache versions of Maxtor, seagate, ibm coming out and the already available WD 8mb, you cant go wrong with that. A ata133 or ata100 drive is simply enough speed for every day use. Unless you are running a huge server and "need" to transfer files quickly, IDE is best for the price. I just bought a 80gb WD special edition drive like 20 mins ago for $40 after MIR and a few days ago bought a 60gb WD for $30 after MIR. You simply cant beat that. Scsi is fast, but not worth the price in my opinion.

 

[glugglug]

Some food for thought:

Here is what various marketing departments have decided to do with HD interfaces (ask the many engineers here you'll see they have almost no say in this)

IDE = consumer market = semi-experimental & number-driven - newest fastest technology pushed out ASAP
SCSI = business/enterprise market, restricted to technology which has proven reliable (proven means its been in use for at least a couple years, and is pretty much outdated relative to whats getting put in the IDE drives with the ridiculously fast rate drives have been improving lately)

Numbers to back this up, specific to your situation:
(media transfer rate = physical disk <-->internal buffer, not buffer<--> SCSI/IDE bus)

Seagate 15K 36GB Cheetah peak media transfer rate : 69MB/s (552Mb/s)
WD1200JB (120GB) peak media transfer rate: 75.25MB/s (602Mb/s)
WD2000JB (200GB) peak media transfer rate: 92MB/s (736Mb/s)

Hint: if you use a 36GB partition on that 200GB drive, the seek times are lower because it never has to go full stroke, bringing the access times pretty much in line with the Cheetah.

Edit: Note the new 73GB Cheetahs are quite a bit faster, but are you gonna pay $1000 per drive?

Yes, that's right, I'm saying the IDE drive you already own is technically faster than high-end SCSI.

Benefits of SCSI:

1) not limited to 2 devices on the bus, much faster switching between which device is talking on the bus, so better for large RAID arrays (for a 2-drive array since you have more than 1 IDE channel it doesn't really matter)
2) less CPU usage so better on a multitasking system as pointed out above

Worth the cost? I would definately say no.

 

[teqwiz]

Ditto on the IDE RAID setup.

I have dual 80- GIG WD 8 mbs, Check my rig, and I can load Morrowwind in less than 20 seconds. A daunting task for my good old MAXTOR 40 gig. 1.5 to 3 minutes, even with diskkeeper in cont. mode. If you need better performance than that, I believe that you are addicted to your PC as much as I am to mine. Maybe more so.
You really can't go wrong either way. Just balance cost, Performance and noise concerns and you'll have a perfect setup.

lol

 

[Pariah]

"IDE = consumer market = semi-experimental & number-driven - newest fastest technology pushed out ASAP
SCSI = business/enterprise market, restricted to technology which has proven reliable (proven means its been in use for at least a couple years, and is pretty much outdated relative to whats getting put in the IDE drives with the ridiculously fast rate drives have been improving lately)"


It's pretty much the exact opposite of this. SCSI is purely driven by performance and reliability, ATA is purely driven by cost. SCSI uses all the latest technologies, that's why it costs so much, manufacturers have to recoup the costs of R&D. When manufacturers figure out how to produce the technology cheap enough to mass produce it, it trickles down to ATA.


"Numbers to back this up, specific to your situation:
(media transfer rate = physical disk <-->internal buffer, not buffer<--> SCSI/IDE bus)

Seagate 15K 36GB Cheetah peak media transfer rate : 69MB/s (552Mb/s)
WD1200JB (120GB) peak media transfer rate: 75.25MB/s (602Mb/s)
WD2000JB (200GB) peak media transfer rate: 92MB/s (736Mb/s)"


You're comparing apples to oranges. The WD numbers are not media transfer rate (ITR-Internal Transfer Rates) values. The WD number is some bogus buffer to media transfer rate which is a pretty much a useless stat, not that ITR is any more useable in comparing drives. Since WD doesn't quote ITR, you have to use a Seagate to Seagate comparison:

Barracuda V ATA: 570Mbits max
Cheetah 15k.3: 688Mbits max (formatted)

Note that the Cheetah number is formatted speed, which is significantly lower than the ZBR value which is 891Mbits. It's not stated whether the Barracuda number is formatted or not, so the gap might be quite a bit larger. All these numbers are ITR values which in the real world are useless compared to STR numbers. Let's take your original comparison and use realworld STR numbers:

Seagate X15-36LP: 60.5MB-45MB/s
WB 1200JB: 48.8MB-29.2MB/s
Seagate 15k.3: 76.4MB-51.1MB/s

That's a king sized butt whooping especially at the end of the drive by the even the old Seagate. The new one is faster at its slowest point than the WD is at its fastest point.


"Hint: if you use a 36GB partition on that 200GB drive, the seek times are lower because it never has to go full stroke, bringing the access times pretty much in line with the Cheetah."


That's bogus. The 2.16ms advantage the Seagate has in average latency alone will make sure the WD can't compete. Even without that, the 15k drives use much smaller platters (2.6in vs 3.5in), which means that worst case full stroke seeks are still better than even the average seek time for an ATA drive. Then add on the latency advantage and you see where this is going...


"Yes, that's right, I'm saying the IDE drive you already own is technically faster than high-end SCSI."


Not on this planet. Take a look at Storage Review and compare the 15k.3 to the WD 1200JB, it's not a pretty sight, with the Seagate winning a number of the benchmarks by more than 100%.


"Worth the cost? I would definately say no."


For most people, probably not, but don't make wild claims that ATA is the superior technology, in no uncertain terms, it isn't.

 

[mcveigh]

yeah but saying you have a scsi system makes you "L33t"

<--has scsi system

 

[sharkeeper]

SCSI is very scalable!

ATA disks can't touch this speed for sure. However, that speed comes at a cost and I'm not just talking about your wallet! 8 15K drives require a special enclosure with LOUD fans, the cabling is expensive and the thing is damn loud! Take it for what it is, if you have the NEED, SCSI is there and can be configured to meet your needs.

For a home PC, I prefer peace and quiet. Get a gig+ of memory and a decent hard drive to store everything on and you'll be more than happy.

Cheers!

 

[dszd0g]

Good post Pariah. I am not sure where glugglug got those numbers from, it must be from IDE marketing material. It does not match the benchmarks I have seen or my own benchmarks that I have done personally.

Furthermore, those people who go the RAID-0 route make an access time and further CPU sacrifice for increased bandwidth. In most usage this is a decent tradeoff to make, but one can not say that IDE RAID-0 is competetive with SCSI.

 

[Submit]

I wish I could get behind a PC with a Cheetah X15 and see for myself...anyone have this setup and live near chicago???

My idea was to get an 18gig Cheetah + Adaptec controller and put Windows and all my programs on it. Then use the other two IDE drives for storage.

I was thinking that having windows and all my programs on a fast SCSI drive would make everything work a lot faster: things like extracting ISO images, doing a full system virus scan, playing with Photoshop and so on.. I am wrong about this? will there not be a noticable difference? I was always under the impression that the IDE drive was the slowest part of my system.

Thanks again for all the information.

 

[teqwiz]

I changed my mind. Buy alot of SCSI and sell me the WD. At used car prices of course.

 

[Submit]

Originally posted by: teqwiz
I changed my mind. Buy alot of SCSI and sell me the WD. At used car prices of course.

I don't plan on selling of my drives as I need them for all my iso's, mp3's, movies... Having 200 GB's in this pc over 90% of the space is used

BTW, never trust a used car salesman.

 

[Dug]

Originally posted by: Submit
I wish I could get behind a PC with a Cheetah X15 and see for myself...anyone have this setup and live near chicago???

My idea was to get an 18gig Cheetah + Adaptec controller and put Windows and all my programs on it. Then use the other two IDE drives for storage.

I was thinking that having windows and all my programs on a fast SCSI drive would make everything work a lot faster: things like extracting ISO images, doing a full system virus scan, playing with Photoshop and so on.. I am wrong about this? will there not be a noticable difference? I was always under the impression that the IDE drive was the slowest part of my system.

Thanks again for all the information.

I've had both- you aren't missing out on anything.
18g imho is not enough to put your os and apps on. I might be wrong but I think you will run out of space real quick.
The Hard Drive in general is the slowest part of your system. So when this speeds up it seems like your whole system speeds up.. Your CPU doesn't do anything unless its fed information- and that info comes from your hd.

But think for a moment how much is loaded off your hard drive at anyone time. Lets say you have a game that needs to load 30MB. Do you really think that the difference between 50 to 60MB/s will make a difference. Nope. Do you think shaving off 3 milliseconds on the seek time will make a big difference. Nope.

Is the SCSI faster and better? The newest Cheetah's are. But like I said, the expense, size, noise, and heat aren't worth those milliseconds of time you are saving. Which btw equates to a couple of eye blinks. If you can't wait that much longer for something to load then you've got a problem.

If you have multiple machines accessing your hard drives.... or want a RAID 5 setup that hotswapable... that's where scsi reigns supreme.

 

[Fallengod]

Originally posted by: Dug

Originally posted by: Submit

Is the SCSI faster and better? The newest Cheetah's are. But like I said, the expense, size, noise, and heat aren't worth those milliseconds of time you are saving. Which btw equates to a couple of eye blinks. If you can't wait that much longer for something to load then you've got a problem.

.

I agree with all that, Thats why I think scsi is such a waste of money and almost totally useless. Anyone who cant wait a few more seconds has issues.

 

[TonyB]

SCSI has something that IDE doesnt and that is the 5 years warranty. That is a bold statement by itself and to me, reliability has precedence over cost with speed comming in second.

I personally am a SCSI user, my first SCSI drive was the 1st gen. cheetah 9GB 10k, cost me $999 back in 1997, It has lasted me for over 4 1/2 years, ive recently upgraded to a 36GB X15-36LP.

You might say to yourself 9GB or 36Gb is not enough, but you can run a hybrid SCSI/IDE system running your OS on the SCSI drive and storing your files/mp3's/movies on an IDE drive. That is what I do myself.

SCSI drives are built with performance and reliability in mind.
IDE drives are built with storage and cost in mind.

SCSI isnt for everyone, but for those who can afford it, its certainly not a waste of money.

... And deep down inside, every true hardware enthusiast wants one!