What's faster, Raid or SCSI?

[RSVandy]

Can someone please tell me which setup is faster, Raid 0 or a SCSI setup (not counting SCSI Raid)? I tried searching to find a topic like this, but I couldn't find it.

 

[TunaBoo]

SCSI SCSI SCSI

but much more $$ for less space.

 

[andalas]

You might want to rethink about using IDE RAID 0.
If one of your drive is hosed than you will lost all your data and with the current state of IDE quality.

SCSI has faster access time but RAID 0 have faster transfer rate.

 

[RSVandy]

Thanks guys. I already knew about the drive failure consequences with Raid 0...seems like a lot of hard drives failing nowadays. I've been with this hard drive on this computer for about 5 years now and have never had a problem with hard drives failing with my other drives.

 

[Shooters]

What andalas said.

Personally I would rather have the super fast seek time of a SCSI drive rather than the extra transfer rate of an IDE RAID 0 solution. Why?.....because few people actually use the higher transfer rate of RAID 0 and it's really not that much greater than that of a SCSI drive. I read a review once where two IBM 75GXPs in a RAID 0 were tested against a single Seagate X15 15000 RPM SCSI drive. The IBM array had an average read speed of 38 MB/sec. The Seagate's was 35.7 MB/sec.....not that much slower. However, the Seagate has a seek time of 3.9 ms whereas the IBM seek time is nearly double that.

 

[bacillus]

you've got to love those x15s!

 

[gsaldivar]

Unfortunately, RSVandy didn't really tell us why he is considering RAID-0, so we can really only guess as to which would be "faster" for his needs...

Take Photoshop for instance. Here is an example of an application in which a power-user would benefit greatly from RAID-0. Redundancy is not needed, just very high speed storage for temporary (scratch) files. Seek time for this application is negligible: Once the scratch file is opened to disk, the rest of the transformation time (5 minutes or more is not uncommon) in spent in sustained transfer. By striping the data simultaneously over two decent ATA-100 drives, large Photoshop files are now much easier to work with.

For a budding graphic artist, a softRAID with two cheap IDE drives instead of a Seagate Cheetah suddenly looks very attractive.

Maybe if RSVandy can tell us more about his plans for the setup, we can be of more help.