SCSI Question!

[Akaz1976]

Hi,

I have never used SCSI and have little knowledge about it. But lately i have been getting really tired my IDE draggin its foot all the time. So i have decided to try and get a SCSI setup. Now from what i can tell one can get a good ~ 30gig 15000 RPM drive for ~$400. But what else would i need to make SCSI work? and is it compatiable with all the systems or do u need a special setup?

Akaz

PS. My current setup is in my sig

 

[Lucky]

You would need a SCSI controller card; fits in a PCI slot. I'll let other more experienced in this recommend specific models of cards to get.

 

[mmcwiz]

Are you building a server or a desktop machine? If this is to be a production, medium to high load sever than scsi is the only way to go. For a home machine you will see absolutely no real-world improvements with scsi drives. Please refer to the following article for more details.

Link

 

[bozo1]

I'll leave the debate as to whether SCSI would be a good choice to others.

If you decide to go the SCSI route:

You need a SCSI host adapter. The LSI Logic U160 is a good choice for about $79 w/o cable or $115 for the version that includes cable. You need a terminated LVD cable so get the version that includes the cable.

Also, make sure your drive has a 68-pin connector. Drives with an 80-pin SCA connector require an SCA-to-68pin converter and those cause problems for many people.

HyperMicro is one of the best sources for SCSI components.

 

[Lucky]

Originally posted by: mmcwiz
Are you building a server or a desktop machine? If this is to be a production, medium to high load sever than scsi is the only way to go. For a home machine you will see absolutely no real-world improvements with scsi drives. Please refer to the following article for more details.

Link

I was of the impression that if you do lots of copying to/from different hardrives or machines on a networks SCSI was beneficial because it had its own processor to handle the copying instead of leaching off the regular CPU. True?

 

[bozo1]

This is true but:

How often would you copy that much data to justify the expense?
With the speed of current systems, the extra CPU cycles IDE takes up may not be noticeable to most people these days.

 

[Lucky]

Originally posted by: bozo1
This is true but:

How often would you copy that much data to justify the expense?
With the speed of current systems, the extra CPU cycles IDE takes up may not be noticeable to most people these days.

Well, if that is true than mmcwiz's statement is false, at least for some. I frequently transfer large files, as I use a file server with RAID redundancy to store stuff and then pull or replace files as needed.


Just this morning I was transferring several folders in both directions, perhaps 2 gigs total and it bogged down so much on my main rig (Athlon 1.2) that it took over half an hour to finish transferring. Now, I guess it all depends on how much money one has to spend but I would certainly find it worthwhile.

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: Lucky


Just this morning I was transferring several folders in both directions, perhaps 2 gigs total and it bogged down so much on my main rig (Athlon 1.2) that it took over half an hour to finish transferring.

Your problem is highlighted in bold. It is a very bad idea to transfer files to and from drives at the same time regardless of what kind of drives you have. The CPU is not the problem here. It would be considerably quicker to move files in one direction wait until that is done and then transfer in the other direction instead of doing both at once. The better access time of SCSI will make bidirectional transfers faster than IDE, but it will still be bogged down despite the CPU offloading.

 

[Akaz1976]

Well i am primarily a gamer and i thought that primariy benefit to me would be faster load times and getting rid of these annoying 4-5 sec freezes that i get in games like Morrowind and DAoC that have huge zone less areas.

Akaz

 

[FishTankX]

Hmm, the Adaptec Ultra160 model is mighty nice. Be sure to get one that supports atleast 80MB/s of bandwidth, and if you wanna go completly SCSI make sure to make the move to SCSI optical drives as the IDE variety tend to drag their feet in bad-sector-read situations. That's it. I'd just get a 15000RPM 18GB SCSI drive and use your IDE drive right there for data archiving of unfrequently used data.

 

[mmcwiz]

You and Lucky have both hit the nail right on the head. In your situation scsi drives are not going to help your games load noticeably faster. In Lucky's case scsi drives would be a minor improvement. The real benefit of scsi is when you have a thousand users reading from and writing to the drive simultaneously.

 

[Lucky]

Originally posted by: mmcwiz
You and Lucky have both hit the nail right on the head. In your situation scsi drives are not going to help your games load noticeably faster. In Lucky's case scsi drives would be a minor improvement. The real benefit of scsi is when you have a thousand users reading from and writing to the drive simultaneously.

OK, thanks. I just have my little 5 computer home network. Not justifyable to me to switch to SCSI at this point but maybe in the future.