Hard Drive advice - SCSI or IDE?
 

I'm looking for a bit of advice on what new hard drive to buy.

I'm looking for a very fast hard drive, I want to use it for windows XP and my programs. Speed is the main factor I'm looking for, I want something that is very fast that will open applications like adobe photoshop & premiere fast and load windows faster.

My current hard drives are IDE (Maxtor 7200 RPM, Cache 2 MB, MTR: 133 Mbps) They're old and far too slow

I'm just going to use them as storage for my files

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated

scsi is more exprensive and uses more power, but its faster.
IDE/SATA is good if you need storage and your not burning up the server itself.

What he said, ive had a scsi drive running my OS for years, its teh shiznit compared to the issues ive had with IDE's

SCSI is for more high-end sort of activities (usually found within the server and enterprise platforms), and costs more; but for the kind of usage you are asking, Serial ATA (S-ATA) should be adequate.

If you need a PCI to S-ATA adaptor then hit me up and i'll send you one in the post for the charge of postage (i noticed you live in NI and I had a room clear-out today). :thumbsup

Get yourself a WD Raptor SATA Hard Drive with 16 MB Cache and 10,000 RPM.

Price is no problem, speed is the most important thing (along with reliability of coarse)

If price was not an issue would you go with SCSI or S-ATA?

That's a very kind offer and much appreciated man :thumbsup If I decide on the S-ATA HD then I will certainly hit you up on ICQ

Get yourself a solid state NAS unit. They are only about $30K now for a new one.

are my ide drives really that bad?

[squishypimpmode]go SCSI. its not that hard of a decision.[/squishypimpmode]

SCSI. Always. To put it (not 100% nerd correct, but good enough to be considered truth) as simply as possible, with IDE, your CPU handles all of the transactions, and you can only do one at a time. With SCSI, this is offloaded to the SCSI controller, so the CPU is free, and you don't have it 'waiting' while it's locked in one task, before you can go on to another.

If you do a load of photo work (as you mentioned above), go SCSI. U320 isn't that expensive. The disks are, and they're a bit smaller, but put your OS on one, and use another SCSI disk for your scratch/etc, and maybe just an SATA for 'big storage'. You'll be glad you did.

Hmm. Admittedly my experience with both is limited (the joys of being a cheapskate), but i am aware S-ATA can be hotplugged and from memory, i think they run at 150 Mbps (correct me if i am wrong); i think SCSI goes faster, but you do pay a lot more for it - not to mention you're going to need a SCSI controller card, which could potentially slow the whole thing down (PCI buses have a limited bandwidth).

Go Raid 0 with the 10k Raptor drives.

SATA.. IDE/SCSi doesnt compare

So does that mean PCI can handle the speed of a sata, is it comparable or do lose some when using the adapter rather then the on board?

A quick bit of research informs me that the PCI bus can only accommodate up to 133 MB/sec, which is slower than both S-ATA (150 MB/sec - sorry about the mbps mistake in the previous post) and SCSI (i forget, but it can vary).

Essentially, unless your motherboard has an onboard SCSI or S-ATA port, the fastest performance you are going to get is 133 MB/sec regardless.

:thumbsup

That's what I have. It kicks ass.

You guys are going too internerd.

Those numbers are BURST rates. No desktop HD is going to sustain enough to saturate a PCI bus. RAID 0 is also, pardon me, dumbtarded. You might shave a few ms access time off, but the moment you get one power hit, hello corruption!

SATA-1 is theoretical 150, SATA2 is 300. You'll never see that. The chipsets are cheap commodities, and most of the work is done on the CPU. SCSI is still very much a hardware solution.

If you want something that's not going to hiccup when you want to render video AND listen to MP3s at the same time, SATA can probably do it. SCSI, however, will let you check your email and post on GFY, too. ;)

I would go with IDE

SATA sounds like it would be a lot less hassle

And if you don't want to lose your data, choose RAID1 or RAID10 instead...

2x WD Raptor 10k SATA and a good (!) SATA RAID controller and you'll be fine.
Keep in mind that a good controller may cost very well more than both disks, but if you want good performance, you really want to stay away from $50-100 so called "host RAID" units.

SCSI is by far the best and fastest if your looking for speed, its all I used to use (untill recently) on my web and video servers. The one I used was the seagate Cheetah ( http://www.seagate.com/products/discfamily/cheetah )
SCSI drives are louder then IDE drives, they sometimes sound like they are falling apart but I have never had one go out on me.

this should answer most of your questions on what is better and why
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/pr...rformance.html

which is more reliable, scsi or ide?