SCSI newbie questions

[gutted]

I've currently got IDE drives in my PC. It;s time to upgrade my drives to something a bit bigger, and I'm considering doing the SCSI thing. I'm thinking about buying a SCSI controller card, and ditching both my IDE hard drives and buying a decent size SCSI drive.

Questions:

What should I look for in a SCSI card? Wide? Ultrawide? Number of ports? I don't really know much about these things, but I'd like to get something that will be relatively future proof (as long as it's not totally obselete within 6 months that would be cool).

What sort of stuff do I need to know about SCSI hard drives? What is a decent/good speed (10k, 15k etc)? Do they come in different data transfer speeds or is this dependant on wide/ultrawide etc? Do I need to worry about caches etc?

Finally (for the moment at least) I will probably have to keep my IDE CD-RW and DVDROM drives as I can't afford to upgrade everything at once. Bearing this in mind, am I actually going to notice any benefits by upgrading only HDDs or will the system be held back by the IDE components? e.g. is it better to wait until I can do the whole lot in one go?

I'm a total newbie to SCSI - all I've got is the general impression that they are faster than IDE so I'm looking to speed up my OS a bit (Win2ksp2 on P4 1.4GHz, 512MB Rambus).

Any advice appreciated

Cheers,
Dan.

[freddy]

unless u spend a LOT of money , u ain,t gonna see any improvement on modern ide drives ,,ide drives have progressed a lot over the last few years ,,,i took the plunge and spent a lot of money on a plextor and a yam cd and cdr a couple of years ago ,,modern ide is cheeper and faster ,,,


save your money ,,if your board won,t support large drives , buy a controller card.


good luck

freddy

[silencio]

First, U160 or U320 is what you want. This is the speed of the card, cable, and hard drive interface. This is how much data you can move over the cable. It's like ATA66/100/133. When buying SCSI hardware make sure the drive, card, and CABLE all support the same speed. Many people use old cables and wonder why nothing works right.

Second, IMO, 10K is a speedy enough drive for a home machine. The extra heat and SOUND of a 15K drive are negative attributes for a home machine. I have a 15K Fujitsu drive as my C: drive and it's just too loud. Here's a couple links on U320 15K and U160 10K drives. http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/...ml#performance http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031119/index.html

Third, keep your IDE stuff! If you have SCSI for your HDs, you have more open IDE channels to run your CD/DVD drives independently on a single channel.

Finally, for a home machine I'm not sure if I'd buy SCSI. SATA drives/interfaces will be closing a bit of the gap between IDE and SCSI performance. SCSI will still outperform IDE but by how much and is it really worth the extra $$?

[gutted]

Thanks freddy and silencio

My BIOS supports fairly decent size drives - I've got a 20GB and 40GB drive in at moment - I was thinking about getting a couple of 40GB SCSI (I'm about 10GB short of space for ripping the rest of my CDs to MP3) . I was expecting to pay in the region of 100 quid for the controller and around the same for each drive... If it probably wouldn't benefit me to go for SCSI, I'll just get a monster IDE drive instead. I've been looking at prices today - 250GB for less than 200?! That's insane

I'd never even heard of SATA before I started looking at drives today I'll read up and see what the deal is - cheers for that. Perhaps SCSI is not the way after all... I could always spend the cash on a decent gfx card instead, I guess

Dan.

[CeeBee]

SCSI is great for an enterprise server where you have many users or where you are running a database. They beat IDE both by transfer speed and - what is very important in such an environment - by seek time (compare 3-4 to 8-9ms). However for a home machine I would stick with a good IDE drive, or even better with a RAID1 array if you want to be safe. SCSI drives have 5 yrs warranty, IDE only 1... I wonder why

[gazzak]

Add me to the IDE brigade. SCSI for servers, IDE for home.

[tommo666]

A quick check - 73gb SCSI around 150 - 200 UK, 80gb Western about 56 UK.

IDE - 2 devices on a channel and 1 accessed at a time.
SCSI - 15 (ish) on a channel and can all be accessed at the same time.

Which why they're ideal for servers. Excellent performance can be had from SATA drives on raid 0.

You could always go to the 'Darkside' and convert your disks to dynamic and create mirrors and stripes, assuming XP pro. Me i've 4 drives hanging off a pci IDE card, No raid. Just disks (jbod) and it's fast enough.

You could always buy bigger ide/sata drives in place of scsi.

[gutted]

Cheers again everyone. Sound slike SCSI is kind of overkill for a home system

I'll have a look into RAID or SATA.

Cheers again for all your advice - you've probably saved me a few hundred quid

Dan.

PS - Hornets rule

[confus-ed]

Cheers again everyone. Sound slike SCSI is kind of overkill for a home system

I'll have a look into RAID or SATA.

Cheers again for all your advice - you've probably saved me a few hundred quid

Nobody ever really answered your original questions but got sidetracked ..

Generally in most pc systems the limiting factor performance wise is either the cpu or disk access, so for high end machines its just disk access, pretty much everything else is faster, but that depends of course on circumstance.

Limiting factory for IDE speed is the PCI bus, it goes at 133 & that's as fast as IDE can go, SATA has a 'current' top speed of 150, faster than the pci bus, so its peak speed is limited again to 133 (on your board, but on a newer one the connections are different so it can get full whack)... SCSI 160 goes at that & Ultra 320 at 320 !, put either of these on a 'standard' 32 bit pci system & again you are limited to 133... If you want full power from them , then you need a 64 bit bus & a much dearer motherboard.

If you want to 'future proof' yourself, then my suggestion is to get yourself a pci SATA controller for about £20 & then a nice fast SATA drive (10k) if you can find one ... SATA motherboards will become the norm as will SATA drives replacing IDE which is actually PATA