Need Speed

[Hew Jazz]

Im looking for the fastest 36gig SCSI hard drive there is. I dont want anything larger in size than that seeing as there quite expensive drives. Will just use my 120gig sata2 for storage. Also, whats the cheapest scsi adapter card that wont hinder the drives performance? I am new to SCSI so if theres anything I should look out for or be worried about when using it for a typical desktop gaming system, please let me know. Thanks very much for any info.

 

[alimoalem]

from a quick 2-minute check of prices, the cheapest 36GB 10K SCSI drive is $36 and 15K $81. the 36GB 15K rpm is not going to be much faster (if faster at all) than most modern 250GB 7200rpm SATA drives. it's also the same price as the 250GB drives and much smaller. rpm is not all that matters when it comes to harddrives, platter density matters too. the larger the platter density, generally the faster the drive.

unless you're going with at least a 74GB SCSI drive, i find it useless for the hassle of getting all the parts and setting it up to not get improved performance

EDIT: i just saw in ur sig if you have a 36GB raptor. i think the 36gb raptor is actually slower than the seagate 7200.10 250gb and western digital's newer 7200rpm drives. i would think the SCSI drive you consider getting (seeing as it most likely will be one of the older ones) will perform similarly to the raptor you have

 

[Hew Jazz]

Would this SCSI 320 controller card get the job done?

http://www.frontierpc.com/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=201E24396

This is the cheapest one I can find thus far(canadian dollars)

 

[Hew Jazz]

Originally posted by: alimoalem
from a quick 2-minute check of prices, the cheapest 36GB 10K SCSI drive is $36 and 15K $81. the 36GB 15K rpm is not going to be much faster (if faster at all) than most modern 250GB 7200rpm SATA drives. it's also the same price as the 250GB drives and much smaller. rpm is not all that matters when it comes to harddrives, platter density matters too. the larger the platter density, generally the faster the drive.

unless you're going with at least a 74GB SCSI drive, i find it useless for the hassle of getting all the parts and setting it up to not get improved performance

EDIT: i just saw in ur sig if you have a 36GB raptor. i think the 36gb raptor is actually slower than the seagate 7200.10 250gb and western digital's newer 7200rpm drives. i would think the SCSI drive you consider getting (seeing as it most likely will be one of the older ones) will perform similarly to the raptor you have

On the storagereview site they say that the 15k II maxtor drives transfer twice the amount of data per second then my current raptor drive. If this is infact true, dont you think Id notice a huge difference when compressing videos, unraring, game loading?

 

[alimoalem]

if you compare the following two links, you'll see that current drives are faster than the 36GB SCSI drive. link 1 link 2

could you please provide the link to the benchmarks you found?

also, about the adapter, you don't need a $123 u320 adapter. you'll be using only one drive so you won't be using up the full bandwidth of eve a u160 adapter. i would search ebay, the for sale/trade forum, etc. for a used one for much cheaper

either way, does $123 plus the price of the drive plus shipping/tax justify the performance increase? i would like some harddrive gurus to get in on this so i'll try bumping the thread tomorrow but i honestly think the 320gb drives will perform better than the 36gb drive you're looking for

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Hew Jazz
Would this SCSI 320 controller card get the job done?

http://www.frontierpc.com/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=201E24396

This is the cheapest one I can find thus far(canadian dollars)

Do you have any PCI-X 133MHz or PCI 66MHz slots? Because that's what you'd need with the SCSI controller you linked to.

 

[Hew Jazz]

I thought I needed a 320 scsi controller in order to use the 320 maxtor 15k II drive? As for a link, I cant seem to find it now but I just did a bencmark of my current raptor drive and got 57mb/sec compared to 97mb/sec with the 15k IIaccroding to the storage review site. Still a nice performance increase I think.

 

[Hew Jazz]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Hew Jazz
Would this SCSI 320 controller card get the job done?

http://www.frontierpc.com/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=201E24396

This is the cheapest one I can find thus far(canadian dollars)

Do you have any PCI-X 133MHz or PCI 66MHz slots? Because that's what you'd need with the SCSI controller you linked to.

Oops, thanks for pointing that out. Nope I need a regular pci or pci express card. Are they not available in this format? Know of any cheap ones you can purchase from Canada? Here is a link to the motherboard I am using

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot...ProductID=2314&ProductName=GA-965P-DS3

 

[Blain]

If you use a regular 33MHz PCI controller card, you can forget about those "Master Blaster" SCSI benchmarks...
You won't get them. :roll:

Originally posted by: Hew Jazz
Need Speed

Option 1: Switch motherboards to get an onboard SCSI controller, one with a PCI-X or 66MHz PCI slots.
Option 2: Buy a 36GB/16MB cache Raptor or a little more for the 74GB/16MB cache version
Option 3: Buy a RAID controller card, and RAID 0 two Seagate 7200.10 250GB HDs.