SCSI or raided IDE?

[The Belgain]

I was thinking of getting a small SCSI HD (under 10 gig) to use just as a system disk, for frequently used programs, and possibly to store the vobs for encoding. Is it worth it or should i just get 2 big ide drives, stripe raid them (i have onboard raid on my iwill XP-333r)?

The problem at the moment is that the whole system gets slowed down by smartripper and dvd2avi using up all the bandwidth of my system disk.

Would i get a substantial speed improvement running the OS from either a SCSI (was looking at a 10,000 rpm drive; are the 7200 SCSI drives really faster than 7200 IDE ones?) or a raided ide drive?

[karloz1]

I'm no hardware genius, but AFAIK there is no way a SCSI drive could be faster then an IDE drive. SCSI is outdated and slow. A USB, USB2, or firewire drive might be closer to IDE. I keep my OS, dual boot winME and winXP, on my 20 gig drive (two 10 gig partitions), and keep all of my other data on a 80 gig drive. It works out pretty well. Except for the fact that my burner doesn't work and they are both getting full, so I have no way of backing up data to make room for more :(

Edit: Ok, maybe I might be wrong about SCSI 10,000 RPM drives...

[omol]

Originally posted by karloz1
I'm no hardware genius, but AFAIK there is no way a SCSI drive could be faster then an IDE drive. SCSI is outdated and slow. A USB, USB2, or firewire drive might be closer to IDE. I keep my OS, dual boot winME and winXP, on my 20 gig drive (two 10 gig partitions), and keep all of my other data on a 80 gig drive. It works out pretty well. Except for the fact that my burner doesn't work and they are both getting full, so I have no way of backing up data to make room for more :(

Edit: Ok, maybe I might be wrong about SCSI 10,000 RPM drives...

SCSI is Slow??? NO way can be faster than IDE drive? Name one IDE drive's seek time that's as low as 5 ms which is common on SCSI drive? Name one IDE drive/chipset combo that can do BUS disconnection? Name one IDE drive/chipset combo that let you simultaneously access more than 1 device on a single channel? And FYI, only 7200 rpm SCSI drives you can easily get today is Seagate Baracuda SCSI (which happen that I acquired one when they first came out and still running as / on my linux server. Try that with IDE). They were King but totally outclassed now and their performance shouldn't be taken as judgment against SCSI. Try something more decent like Fujitsu MAN series or Seagate Cheetah series. SCSI is NOT slow, but does come at a cost. To get some really unbias info in determining which SCSI or IDE drive suit your need, please be enlightened at Storage Review (http://www.storagereview.com/).

regards,
omol

[brashquido]

I agree with omol. SCSI is definately better. The biggest drawback with SCSI is the expense of it all. Do as omol says and have a browse around www.storagereview.com as they really do know their stuff.

Personally, I'd get something like 2 of the 120GB 7200RPM ATA-100 Western Digital HDD with 8MB cache and configure them in RAID 0. I've heard these drives setup in RAID zero rival the performance of most mid level SCSI drives, plus you'll have a massive 240GB to store/edit your VOB files in!

[karloz1]

...uhh, that's why I did the edit, I kinda read around a little...

sorry, didn't mean to insult your HDs.
thank you omol for clearing that up for us.

[stl]

I'm also looking at WD's "special edition" (8mb cache) in raid 0.
they supposed to be fast but people tell me to cool them well. Also remeber that raid 0 is not fault tolerant, if 1 drive goes, so does your data. Recently, I've heard that some raid cards support raid 0+1 (stripping & mirroring) true, you lose some space so get a large set of drives. I bought a PROMISE FASTTRACK IDE raid card ($77 US) which I have yet to install and I believe can stripe & mirror at the same time.

As for firewire, I've had a maxtor personal storage 80g for almost a year and it totally sucks and causes problems. There are known issues with maxtor fwire and windows98. People say it's a matter of fAT32 vs. NTFS so hopefully an upgrade to win2k or xp will solve the problem.

[brashquido]

The problem with mirroring is that you loose alot of storage space. To have both striping, and mirroring you need a minimum of 4 drives. 2 of which are used purely for redundancy. If you don't have any means of backup, or have the cash, it's probably well worth considering. However if starting from scratch with a limited budget, I'd probably just get 2 X HDD for RAID 0 and get some sort of large capacity device such as DVD-R for backups. Even a DDS-3 tape drives are affordable now. You can get a drive for around $1200AUS ($650US) and tapes cost about $20AUS ($11US) and hold upto 24GB.

[omol]

Originally posted by stl
I'm also looking at WD's "special edition" (8mb cache) in raid 0.
they supposed to be fast but people tell me to cool them well.

It depends on what you are going to do with your raid. For IDE raid, if you are going to do something that needs thruput, e.g. video editing, you probably won't find anything that can beat WD 8mb in raid 0 set up. But if access/seek time is critical, e.g. www server, database server, IBM is still king, but beware of the heat.

As for firewire, I've had a maxtor personal storage 80g for almost a year and it totally sucks and causes problems. There are known issues with maxtor fwire and windows98. People say it's a matter of fAT32 vs. NTFS so hopefully an upgrade to win2k or xp will solve the problem.

That maxtor firewire drive is very notorious among local DV and video editing guys. A very common symptom is that it suddenly goes offline in the middle of a editing session, i.e., the device disappear as if it is unplugged. It looks like either the power supply component within the device is not powerful enough for prolong usage, or the HD itself is not AV capable, i.e., it needs to recalibrate the head from time to time. I myself would certainly avoid this product. If you need a reliable external firewire storage device and don't mind DIY, they (http://www.bare-bone.com/emain.htm) offer some very good external enclosure.

regards,
omol

[Dagon]

SCSI is faster..
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/s/scsi-1.html

Although I hear IDE is actually really good at handling large non fragmented files. I'm not sure about that though..

Point being..with IDE's bigger space and cheaper cost for what your doing I'd 2nd the suggestion of 2 WD SE 120g IDE in RAID-0

[alanshum]

I think that the major difference between SCSI and ATA devices to overall system performance is SCSI devices are less CPU demanding, so during reading/writing operations, your CPU can be free to continue any other pending tasks/threads. But in ATA environment, your net CPU availability is comparatively lower than in SCSI environment. That's why most servers still stick to SCSI. But for a video editing purpose, data throughput is more important than CPU availability. So a ATA RAID 0 is proper for this purpose. But for video encoding, your bottleneck might be in the encoding speed, so ATA RAID 0 or not, might not make that much difference.

[tiki4]

Maybe I should not interfere here, but the discussion about SCSI or IDE is very, very old...

The argument that ATA devices are more CPU demanding has some truth in it, but since ATA is capable of Direct Memory Access (or Busmastering) this is no longer a huge problem in my opinion. Even during lengthy write operations on an IDE hard disk there should not be more than 1-2 % CPU load. I think modern CPUs can handle that pretty well.

As we are discussing about a setup for a machine that's used at home I think that the main argument for or against SCSI is the price. It seems to hold true nearly everywhere that SCSI hardware is a factor of three or four more expensive than ATA. So my decision is easy: We chose to buy a new dual Athlon machine last year for scientific computing and we decided to get an IBM 60 gig ATA hard drive rather than SCSI. Throughput and everything are really O.K. for a workstation machine (the rest is running Tru64 UNIX on Alpha hardware with SCSI drives).

Server side hardware is something else, but I think only few of you are running file or web servers at home.

CU,

tiki4

[Dagon]

Originally posted by tiki4


So my decision is easy: We chose to buy a new dual Athlon machine last year for scientific computing and we decided to get an IBM 60 gig ATA hard drive rather than SCSI. .



tiki4


Probably a good choice...except it's a IBM drive!
:eek:

[tiki4]

O.K.,

I never made bad experiences with IBM. There were a few 60 gig drives around last year that were broken, but I think the once released afterwards are pretty good.

We even use IBM in our SCSI hardware, so as long as we are happy with that and things are working for us...

tiki4

[theReal]

There was a time when SCSI was so much better than IDE that it was worth buying SCSI devices for home-computers (when IDE was still using PIO modes, IDE HD's transferred like 3MB/s and had a CPU usage of nearly 100%, while SCSI drives already transferred 15MB/s and had a CPU usage of about 1%).

I remember when I had a Pentium 90 with 32MB RAM, I was able to make on-the fly copies of CD's in 4x writing speed with all SCSI devices. That would have been impossible with IDE.

[omol]

Originally posted by tiki4
O.K.,

I never made bad experiences with IBM. There were a few 60 gig drives around last year that were broken, but I think the once released afterwards are pretty good.

We even use IBM in our SCSI hardware, so as long as we are happy with that and things are working for us...

tiki4

Me neither have any bad experience with IBM drives on my own systems since I have a very good case. But if those IBM "pixie dust" (that's what IBM called) drive is to be used in a system with not so good air circulation, then you are only asking for trouble. For IBM "pixie dust" drive, pay close attention to the S.M.A.R.T readings of the drives. Once they reached 45 degree celcius or higher, get better air circulation. Mine is always hovering around 40 degree celcius.

regards,
omol

[omol]

Originally posted by tiki4
(the rest is running Tru64 UNIX on Alpha hardware with SCSI drives).

Argh....the idiotic name for Tru64 makes me sick....;) I hope those Compaq marketoids that make up such name will not be brought into HP.

regards,
omol

[tiki4]

Me too!

A real UNIX guy out there. Well, I didn't ask for that machines, they've been here before I arrived in that group I'm working with. For me Tru64 UNIX is still a pain in the ***

Some while ago it took me reading 200 pages of manuals and around 2 days to figure out how to set the resolution of the Xserver from 1024x768 to 1280x1024. Now after nearly two years with UNIX I feel much better, but I insist on getting new machines with Athlon processors and running Linux. Much cheaper and much easier to handle IMHO. They are even faster than our Compaq UNIX workstations since the Intel compilers are there for free (we are mostly programming Fortran 90).

CU,

tiki4

[omol]

Originally posted by tiki4
Me too!

;)

Some while ago it took me reading 200 pages of manuals and around 2 days to figure out how to set the resolution of the Xserver from 1024x768 to 1280x1024.

If you have a c compiler, I guess you will have better luck with XFree86 Xserver. Is that a TGA 8 plane or 24 plane chip? I've been stuck with a TGA 8 plane chip on a multia box (it's a DEC 21066 Alpha inside) for about 2 years before getting a decent x86 box. It's damn slow, only 166mhz, but hey, it's 64bit....;)

Now after nearly two years with UNIX I feel much better, but I insist on getting new machines with Athlon processors and running Linux. Much cheaper and much easier to handle IMHO. They are even faster than our Compaq UNIX workstations since the Intel compilers are there for free (we are mostly programming Fortran 90).

I recall Digital/Compaq DOES have a very good Fortran compiler for Digital UNIX, but it's not free.

DEC's Alpha rocks! DEC's Tulip (http://ftp.digital.com/pub/digital/info/semiconductor/networks-and-communications/software/dsc-software-nc.html) rocks!

Too bad to see such great platform dies in such painful and slow way....:(

regards,
omol

[Emp3r0r]

I think that the major difference between SCSI and ATA devices to overall system performance is SCSI devices are less CPU demanding, so during reading/writing operations, your CPU can be free to continue any other pending tasks/threads. But in ATA environment, your net CPU availability is comparatively lower than in SCSI environment. That's why most servers still stick to SCSI. But for a video editing purpose, data throughput is more important than CPU availability. So a ATA RAID 0 is proper for this purpose. But for video encoding, your bottleneck might be in the encoding speed, so ATA RAID 0 or not, might not make that much difference
this is the most import features of SCSI... I'd say a good combination of both SCSI and IDE is fine. Since burners and DVD-roms are about the same price as their IDE counterparts i stick those on SCSI and put my cheap hard drives on IDE... SCSI saves you alot of CPU and I wish I had a SCSI DVD-ROM to show you some cpu usage statistics to back that up. You can encode alot faster while ripping your next source files with a SCSI DVD-ROM than an IDE one.

[theReal]

Since burners and DVD-roms are about the same price as their IDE counterparts i stick those on SCSI and put my cheap hard drives on IDE... Not really. But even worse than the price difference is, you only get like one or two SCSI DVD drives and burners, while you get hundreds of IDE models. I was looking for a SCSI burner to replace my old TEAC CDR55S and all I found was one single Brainwave model that had what I wanted - only I couldn't get it anywhere (weird marketing, can't buy them anywhere...)
Then, the Brainwave was still more expensive than a PlexWriter IDE. Finally, I thought "why not IDE?" and I never regretted it. The IDE Burner has never even come close to a buffer-underrun, and if it did, it's got Burn-Proof...
The processor usage is marginal, a few percent, and there's no problem running Seti or encoding at the same time as burning. I really don't know what a SCSI burner could do better for me (except that I would only have had the choice between two models and they would've been more expensive)