stay with SCSI or switch to IDE... recommendation?

[gvb]

Right now I am running two 9 gig U160 SCSI drives off of an Adaptec 39160 controller.

The main use for my computer is email, web, and digital photos. I occasionaly do some beefy photo editing and multitrack audio mixing.

Do I buy two 36 gig U160 SCSI drives and software mirror them in XP.
Or buy two 80 or 120 gig IDE drives (probably the 8mb buffer WD drives), and a Promise IDE RAID controller and go that route?

Any input is mucho appreciated!

-gvb

 

[DieHardware]

Why not keep the SCSI drives and get a large capacity IDE drive for storage.

 

[Lord Evermore]

I think he's trying for high performance storage. Either way, I'd say continue using the SCSI drives for your boot system and normal use, and use an IDE RAID setup for the stuff you need lots of space for. That way you only need to plug in and go, rather than having to copy over XP and fix it to work on the new drives, or reinstall. No reason to get rid of perfectly good and fast SCSI drives.

 

[EeyoreX]

If you can afford it, stay with SCSI. I can't afford it, plus I use massive storage so need inexpensive large discs versus hyper-expensive fast ones.

\Dan

 

[gvb]

I basically just want a mirror of two drives... I'd like to keep things as simple as possible.

I guess I am asking what would be faster... U160 10k SCSI drives on a software mirror, or IDE drives on a hardware mirror?

-gvb

 

[Yoshi]

I use a Powermac G4 with superdrive for all my multimedia work. I have one 37Gb 15K RPM U160 SCSI drive I use for my OS and apps and an 18Gb 15K RPM U160 SCSI drive I use as a scratch disk for Final Cut Express and iDVD. Both drives are IBM Ultrastars on an Adaptec 39160 controller. I use a 60Gb Seagate on local IDE and an 80Gb Western Digital IDE drive on the firewire bus as storage.

 

[Alchemist99]

Originally posted by: gvb
I basically just want a mirror of two drives... I'd like to keep things as simple as possible.

I guess I am asking what would be faster... U160 10k SCSI drives on a software mirror, or IDE drives on a hardware mirror?

-gvb

Why Mirror???, you don't need to for speed, otherwise you wouldnt even be looking at IDE.
Scsi= more reliable, faster, more stable. Answer is easy go scsi you already have the card and two perfectly good drives. so add some more??

 

[aggie113]

I think it boils down to how you would use the drives. SCSI and IDE (8mb cache) are very close in some areas of performance. However, in raw I/O, SCSI is still the king. If you plan on using the drives for storage, IDE. If you plan on using the drives for fast/multiple access of data, then SCSI. But here's a question, why mirroring? Why not just get 3 IDE drives and do Raid 5?