How Many of you are/would consider SCSI?

[Zak33]

I'm a devotee......have been for years....

I just wondered.......do you all know how much faster it really is...?

Now dont giveme that spam about ATA133 and 50 speed burners....

I'm talking about good old fashioned SCSI Ultra running at a humble 40mb/sec.....yes thats right.....40mb/s

No not 133 mb/ sec ATA in split second bursts.....

I have recently built two PC's for people with 10k ATA133 HDD....and Windows boots lovely etc....
BUT...try reloading the same Game Level over and over......go on.....

SCSI OWNS IT.......and my 16speed SCSI burners are equivalent to the 40 speed burners on EIDE.....

Just wondered....

FLAME ME BIG BOYS......FLAME ME

[Dave2986]

I agree but, scsi costs a lot more, and you dont get as much space

so its 15K 36GB or 7200rpm 200GB

200GB wins for me

[Trash Man]

I have thought about trying it in the past but the extra expense and hassle does not seem worth the few seconds you save ovre the space of a week.

How does SATA compare to SCSI?

[Zak33]

Dunno how SATA is...prob comaparable....needs to be, it took long enough to get here.

I built up to SCSI slowly and cheaply....

Thing about SCSI is the hdd ARE big dough, but they are immensley reliable and are good second hand....PLUS.....and not alot of people know this...

you can have loads of them on one controller.....

The SCSI controller I have cost £40 and the HDD were between £50 and £100 each ....

I got 1x18gig Quantum Atlas (7200) with al my Games and Demos on, 1 old Quantum Atlas 8gig(7200) for Music and an 18gig Seagate Cheetah 10k for Win XP install....

AND IT RUNS JUST AS FAST on al three disks as it would on just one...PLUS defrag is quicker.....XP on the fastest helps boot up....and other than DX9 and that kinda stuff, nowt else on it....

Plus a SCSI Burner (Sanyo CRD BP4) which I got 3 of cos they were value....

ALL ON ONE 40mb/sec controller......and it STILL out loads an EIDE machine....

When it got hot learlier this month, a HDD and a Burner came out to keep it cooler....

SCSI rocks.......I have a 160 controller waiting for my next fullinstal, but as lots of you already know...it wasn't much faster than my 40mb/s controller cos I aint got 3 15k HDD throwing stuff at it.

One day tho

[Zak33]

just found 10k 18gig Scsi drives on ebay for less than £30 with only an hour left to go on them....

there's 9gig Scsi drives for £5 !!!!

If you get a SCSI controller with AUTO termination so you aint gotta fiddle with terminating the cables......

[Flibb]

I currently use SCSI to run my scanner and cdrom, but wouldnt bother with running my HD. Costs 2 much and can be a complete pain to get working. A friend was runnin a U160 setup hes just about to sell the card, cable and probaly the drive (hes also into Amigas so drive might end up in an A4000). Also its difficult to get a DvD drive, apart from the slot loaders.
Given the chance Iwould get a Raptor and then a ATA133 as a fast storage drive. I supose its horses for courses, I dont tend to shift large files around and i play online games so no need for any xtra speed there, am currently using a 120gig, 7200rpm 8mb buffer drive. Works fine for me.
Flibb

[Zak33]

DVDis a big prob.....I agree......its an EIDE job for me on the odd occassion Ineed it....
but EIDE makes me come out in a rash

[Flibb]

What all over or just certain places?
Keep your eyes open for the toshiba dvd drives ment to be rather good. You can sometimes find them cheap.
flibb

[Rys]

I used to run a 39160, 2 x 73GB Seagate Cheetah 10K U160's and a first gen X15, U160 18GB. Opticals were a Pioneer 303 DVD and Plextor 12/10/32S CDRW.

All SCSI, all excellent. SCSI is a lot more than just fast rotational speeds and low latency. The protocol is what makes it good, command queuing, all drives can use the bus at once, and a dozen other things. The good thing is, SATA has picked up the majority of what makes SCSI good, and it's low cost.

It just needs controllers that implement the spec properly, from what I can gather, the first gen controllers we're seeing just now don't.

Plus SATA wins on cost. If money is no object, SCSI is all I'd ever spec for storage, but that's only until SATA gets going.

When you start to see people like Rioworks spec SATA on their Opteron hardware, you know it's not too bad

Rys

[acidrainy]

silly question.....
but can you get rounded scsi cables ?

[directhex]

just wait for SAS (Serial Assist SCSI) tbh

--jo

[acidrainy]

2nd Gen SATA is not far away, im sure ive hear a rumer its rated to be 300mb, pair that up in raid 0!

[LoopyJuice]

I would consider it however, i've got 240GB of space atm and I am still in need of more, even if I got 36GB SCSI drives I would need about 7 of them whereas I have 2 normal IDE drives in here.... they were £100 each, how much are 7x36GB SCSI drives going to set me back?!

[petrefax]

Originally posted by acidrainy
silly question.....
but can you get rounded scsi cables ?

yup - u can get em but dunno where atm tho, overclockingstore used to do em

i had an (approx) 2gig scsi drive when i 1st put my current pc together until i could afford a new HDD. noisy as hell, but was pretty nippy. did consider keeping is as a swap file or sommat but didn't bother eventually

we have a few pcs at work with industrial sized scanners connected via scsi & the throughput of these is pretty impressive

the only thing i find prohibitive about scsi stuff is the price, (but then i am a notorious tightwad )

[Zathras]

I'd love an SCSI boot/main drive but can't afford the expense at the moment. I'd also leave things like MP3s and other non-time-critical data on a large IDE drive as capacity is so much cheaper. The thing about SCSI is the quality of production and parts as they are designed for 24/7 server operation.

[Agent]

Originally posted by Zak33
SCSI OWNS IT.......and my 16speed SCSI burners are equivalent to the 40 speed burners on EIDE.....

So putting a 40 speed CDRW up against a 16 speed CDRW would mean the SCSI drive would write it faster ?
I would agree that SCSI would be much better at not producting buffer underruns (thats not really a problem with IDE anymore though due to smartburn, burnproff ect), but i think you'll find that a 40 speed IDE CDRW would be a bit faster than a 16 speed SCSI CDRW.