Old SCSI hard drives, worth using?

[Pob255]

I've got 5 old SCSI hard drives and I'm wondering if they would be worth it over a modern SATA 2 hard drive, performance wise.

The drives are
3x 18.2gb, 10,000rpm, Fujitsu
1x 36.4gb, 10,000rpm, seagate
1x ??Gb, ??rpm, Lucent (Quantum Atlas V series if thats any help)

All are 64-pin Wide Ultra
I do have an old pci SCSI controller card at home, which I could use with these (cannot remember the details off hand)

Just wondering if it's worth putting these disks into some form of raid array to make an OS drive.

[shbris]

chances are any modern 7200 or even 5400rpm drive would crap all over them, so don't bother!!

[abaxas]

chances are any modern 7200 or even 5400rpm drive would crap all over them, so don't bother!!

It will depend on what you used them for. Eg these drives would 'crap all over' any 7200 at random reads due to decreased rotational latency, say for database use.

If it's for an os drive, dont bother. Stick them on ebay

[shaithis]

The fact you would plug them into a PCI SCSI card immediately limits them as far as performance goes.

[jim]

Data density will be rubbish as well, so less data per second. I wouldn't bother.

Still using them at work in our servers (albeit higher capacities) though

[killie99]

the noise from all those 10,000 rpm drives ..... agggghhh, it would drive you insane.

[abaxas]

Data density will be rubbish as well, so less data per second. I wouldn't bother.

Still using them at work in our servers (albeit higher capacities) though

= slow transfer speeds.

but as 10k faster seek times.

Why not throw together a frankenserver running linux and have a play? Maybe vmware too

[jim]

= slow transfer speeds.

but as 10k faster seek times.

Why not throw together a frankenserver running linux and have a play? Maybe vmware too

Only a little bit though. For the hassle of the array, and supporting SCSI, why not buy a second hand raptor?

[shbris]

i stuck an old WD raptor in with the thought that the access times would be sweet, but in reality they were very comparable to my new 7200rpm drives. going from 9ms to 7ms access time doesn't really make any difference, it's only going from 9ms to ssd 0.5ms that ur likely to feel the difference

i like the frankenserver idea though, give it a go! would be interested to see throughput etc. for a 3xRaid0 on those 18gigs

[Saracen]

I've got 5 old SCSI hard drives and I'm wondering if they would be worth it over a modern SATA 2 hard drive, performance wise.
....

Dunno about performance wise, but I use a non-dissimilar collection as a server for my more important data. My logic is that I want that data protected, and available. So I have 6 USCSI discs on a RAID 5 array, including one as a hot spare. I also have a caching hardware RAID controller and drive pays allowing hot swap and instant removal/insertion. Oh, and two spare and identical RAID controllers, a couple of spare disks and a spare 3-disc drive bay all sitting a in drawer, in case of problems.

How it compares to SATA on performance grounds, I don't know ... or care. I do know it's a LOT more resilient than relying on any single drive. So it'd limited capacity and I'm not going to keep a large HD movie collection on it, for for the data I do need it for, it is FAR in excess of the capacity I actually need.

And, addressing the noise aspects that someone mentioned, considering there's 6 10k discs, it's barely audible above ambient noise, and certainly not obtrusive. And actually, I have a feeling their 15k discs but would have to go and check to be sure.

So a collection like that might, if you have the need, be useful (if something of a power hog), but about performance .... dunno.