HDD manufacturers wimp out: 1 year warranty

[bigben2k]

Here's a clip from a UK supplier:


"Important Notice: We have been informed by IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and Fujitsu that all IDE based Hard Disk Drives will revert back to a 1 Year Warranty from October 1st 2002. All SCSI Hard Drives from the above manufacturers will retain their standard 3-5 year manufacturers warranty."


To me, this leaves the door wide open for a sleuth of sub-standard HDDs to appear on the market, along with lax quality control from all the manufacturers. It's going to translate into a price war, which is going to cause the manufacturers to cut costs, by designing HDDs specifically made to last no longer than one year. It's a bad idea, no matter what angle I look at it...

Geesh! Am I going to have to go SCSI now?

[mo]

Perhaps this is an attempt to free up resources to focus on the new generation of HDD using Serial ATA? Im hoping Serial ATA disks will have 3-5 years warranty as well, ESPECIALLY that some people will not just jump at the fact that they are the newest/latest greatest and want to make sure they are up to par.

I remember the first sleuth of 5500 rpm disks had MAJOR problems.

[gmat]

It seems it's the new trend amongst HD manufacturers.
* All ATA (and serial ATA..) disks are down to 1y warranty
* SCSI / FC disks are left to 3 to 5y

IBM opened the fire, and caught a nasty backfire from the user community. But now Seagate, Maxtor and others are following...

For more coverage, and specialized forums about these matters: http://www.storagereview.com (i'm not affiliated in any way... it's just the best site around when talking about HDs)

Personally i couldnt care less, i've been all SCSI for a long time... And it will not change before another long time... ;)

[bigben2k]

Thanks for the link gmat (I reposted my msg).

Ok, so what they're actually doing, is creating 2 tiers of HDDs:
1-the cheapos
2-the quality units

I can see that.

[bigben2k]

Oh, that's brilliant...

Maxtor's Maxline line of HDDs, the 2nd class of HDDs, with a 3 yr warranty, will come in either 200GB, 250GB or 320GB, and the suggested MSRP starts at $300.00!!!

That's it, I'm going SCSI.

[jtroutma]

BigBen:

You should have gone SCSI from the beginning like Gmat and myself :)

I cant speak for Gmat but I am one VERY satisfied customer in the SCSI department..... just wish they wernt so darn expensive. BUT they DO last forever! :D

[bigben2k]

Well thank you jtroutma... I can see now that SCSI was the way to go, now I have an excuse!

[jtroutma]

One other thing I can vouch for in my decision to use SCSI...... higher FSB settings dont seem to affect SCSI systems very much at all. I have had my Adaptec 2940U2W card all the way up to 42Mhz bus and have never given me any problems, even with 5 HDDS, 3 CDROMs, and a Zip 100 onboard :)

[bigben2k]

Yikes! Are you really running 8 drives off of that card?

I always liked the Adaptec 2940s, ever since they came out. That's what I'll be looking at, again.

I'm considering a raid array though. 0+1 probably.

[jtroutma]

Yep, and I am only at 1/2 capacity of it :D

(1) Quantum Atlas V 7200RPM 6.3ms 9.1Gb
(4) Quantum Atlas IV 7200RPM 6.9ms 9.1Gb
(1) Pionneer 6X DVD Drive
(1) Toshiba 32X CDROM Drive
(1) Yamaha 16x12x40x CD-RW Drive
(1) Iomega Zip100

= 8 SCSI devices on 1 controller

I LOVE SCSI! 15 devices for 1 IRQ & 1 Memory Address; that's it!

Oh and dont forget....EXCELLENT performace and reduced CPU overhead. Only drawback is price....

As for RAID arrays, I am currently in the middle of testing my Adaptec AAA-131U2 RAID card again. It is noticeably slower in hardware RAID than with my AHA-2940U2W in software mode. Been trying to answer the question "Why is a software solution faster than a hardware solution?" for quite some time.

Also just found out that you can do software RAID 5 with Win2K server so that is always an option. HEHE just install Win2K Pro and use NTSWITCH to get RAID 5 :)

[g.l.amour]

pff, thought alot about going to scsi, but have always held against it that they make the inside of a pc a total mess. the cables are way too wide., when we are talking serial scsi, i might consider, with the slick thin cables.

in the mean time, i hate the hd manufacturors for the fact that they are making the hdd's a consumer product like say a cdrw. a cdrw could last a year if you're lucky. if your drives are so failure prone, than u could as well skip the whole warranty process.

i work at a pc repair center that cooperates with a warehouse chain, that sells about 15k pc's of same config 2 x a year. they have always had seagate barracuda's(5400's). i like em for being so quiet. since a year they are using the 80GB type. man those are coming back like its a party at our helpdesk. our customers have sort of grown used to finding all their data gone one day. and that day could be even a month or a couple of weeks after purchase. they are falling like flies. those customers are the sort that don't have 3-4 hd's on their system, to make backups all the time. don't understand me wrong, its not as if every drive has already been replaced. only that from 30k pc's sold last year, about 3 - 8 hdd's a day break down. and thats alot more than we used to see. that means that over 2 yrs there are optimistically +/- 3 - 4% of all their hard drives that break down over warranty period (we offer 2 yrs warranty). i can understand that that costs them huge money, as a manufacturar normally strives to keep their failure rate way under 1% (+/-0.2%

[mo]

SCSI is great.. I run my OS on a 36 gig Quantum Atlas 10k for my operating system, but for storage and divx movies and mp3s and everything else Im still using ID. at $300 for 200+ gig harddisk starting price (brand new item which will probably get cheaper as newer and bigger and faster disks come out) it is still a great deal where extreme performance is really just a luxury.

None of my 4 IDE Disks have gone bad, 3 years and over 2000 movies later:)

[gmat]

Jroutma is right, i'm 100% satisfied with my SCSI config.
A bit of background. I've owned HDDs since 1989, when 4MB was "huge". Back then SCSI was the only way (i had an Amiga). Then came the PC and IDE drives. The first thing i noticed was, IDE drives were *slower* than my previous SCSI drives... not good. So i eventually came back to SCSI by the means of an Adaptec 2940 (had to earn some money for it, so it took some time...).
Now i've got the 29160, Ultra SCSI plextor units, Ultra160 HDDs - and i'm waiting for the Seagate Cheetah 15K.3, the fastest drive in existence...
In the meantime i'm still on IDE drives at work. I can *feel* the difference. The OS is less snappy, i'd say "sluggish", drive accesses lock up the machine, and HDD units die like flies on a window in summer.
Each time i get back home (set aside the watercooled experience) it's like i'm "back to the future" :) Quick OS loading times, instant program launching, pain-free *swap file accesses* (!! the most noticeable !!)... In those games where data is fed more or less continuously from the HD, no hang-up...
Add to this, the mechanically superior units (=longer life times), easy setup in OS (nothing to do...), no chipset / driver problems (ive got the infamous KT133) since only the Adaptec has to be known by the OS - and Adaptec drivers are standard in every OS.
Besides one can find rounded SCSI cables - at a price though.

So may i get back to ATA or even Serial ATA ? I dont think so, and the current trend from manufacturers confirms this choice...


(edit)
BB2K, if you got the U160 way, forget the RAID. Unless you *really* need the mirroring security (ie you're running an enterprise-class server) it's a waste of money, heat, and case room. The latest 10K units (Cheetah 10K.6, Atlas 10K.4, Fujistsu MAM) or 15K units (Cheetah 15K.3, upcoming Atlas, Fujitsu MAN) are so blazing fast that you dont need the added speed of RAID striping.
If it's for your personal PC, stick to a single A29320 (since the 160 is gone...) and 1 or 2 good HDD unit(s). I'd say, a small 15K for the OS and critical programs (=games), and a big 10K for data storage and other programs.
(/edit)

[DarkEdge]

Well SCSI is cool but I would like to see how serial ata turns out. I don't think the first run will be that impressive but i'm looking forward to the second revision.

If I had the money however I wouldn't be waiting on SCSI. I have almost 320gb of storage space I use. I couldn't afford to eat if that was all SCSI. I could run a 10gig drive for the os and a couple of games but thats not worth it to myself.

[bigben2k]

I started to look into all this yesterday.

First off, IDE will give max 133 transfer rate, while SATA tops out at 150 right now.

SCSI can do 160, with an Adaptec 29160, or a cheaper 19160. There are also 320 drives, but they're mostly server units.

This stuff is still expensive, and I don't have an economical RAID 0/1 solution...

Gonna have to re-think this again...

[g.l.amour]

how about scsi noise? i now have a 5400rpm seagate baracuda. since i don't know anything faster (it is faster than alot of 7200rpm's), it is ok for what i use it for.it is about the most silent drive i ever used. problem is that with the watercooling and silent psu, the ide hdd is the noisiest component at the moment. so installing scsi will prolly get my case temps up; and the sheer rpm increase leads me to believe that the noise will go up with the same percentage.

[bigben2k]

Noise is one issue, temps are another.

I'm sure that even at 10'000 rpm (common for SCSI), it's not that loud. The newest drives out there are pretty quiet. If need be, I could rubber mount them: you'd be surprised how little noise you get when you isolate a component.

As for heat, I could use a waterblock, or the drive cages that come with my Chieftech DA-01 to vent them, so I'm not concerned about that either.

[nuclear]

gmat

I think I can add a little something about IDE.
I am currently running a little 20g quantum fireball as my os hd. I also have a raid 0 of 2 quantum fireball 20g as my game disk. So gaem that do constant access and things like these are running perfectly fine, and since it's not on the os hd, i can do multiple things on the raid array without reducing the perofrmance of my os.
But I also have an older scsi hardware raid array of 3 really old seagate 9.1g (full height) and even if the disk are slower then my ide array, i can send it 2 or 3 copy and the ssame time, without any slow down. Scsi has it's benefit, but it's costy, and using multiple fast IDE drive ofset this benefit but using a 15k drive, i might change my vision of things (i do have the u160 raid controller in the form of a 39160 on board of my tk7). So until then, i will still run IDE :P


Myself, I will build a raid-0 array of 2 baracuda 5 serial ata 80g 8megs(as soon as they arrive on the market and seagate set their waranty at 3 years as stated on the spec sheet) for data and games, and move my os on the raid-0 on the little promise.:p :p

[gmat]

Thats a point. But even ATA Raid is more costly in terms of system resources than single SCSI drive.
BB2K i still dont see why you want Raid0+1. You running a big web server ?
Yes as far as money goes SCSI units are *way* more expensive than ATA ones. But consider those gains:
- speed
- mechanical superiority (=greater reliability)
- speed
- lower system resources
- speed
- lower overall noise/heat (compared to ATA Raid...)
- did i mention speed ?

If i had to choose between a RAID of 5400rpm barracuda's that have 1y warranty, and a single SCSI 15K drive with 3 to 5y of warranty, it would be the 15K drive. Why ?
Look the figures (storagereview.com). One 15K unit is *quiet* even compared to 7.2K ATA units. Heat problem ? No more heat problem with modern drives. You pay a premium price, but you got what you paid for - a mechanical jewel.
(side note: it seems that 15K drives are generally quieter than 10K ones...)

Ah about transfer rates. You must take the protocol into account. With SCSI the controller (usually a powerful RISC chip) manages the transfer and concurrent accesses. With IDE each drive try to get the bus for itself. That was a short explanation but there are several good documents about this on the web. Anyway the result is - multiple drives live happier on a SCSI bus than on an IDE bus.
Another point, if you're considering a single drive, the fastest drive today is the Seagate Cheetah 15.3 which can transfer between 51 MB/s and 76 MB/s. The fastest IDE drive is the WD Caviar 800JB which does 29 MB/s to 49 MB/s... (figures range from inner platter zone to outer zone). And in no way two caviars in Raid0+1 will perform like a 15K.3, due to Raid overhead (and ATA-specific issues on top of this...)

In short, if money doesnt matter go SCSI. If you're on a budget, you're looking at the wrong site to begin with :D In any case, you always get what you paid for.

(edit) argh i forgot to mention access times. 15K drive access times contribute a *lot* to the 'snappiness' of operations... Why did ppl like old Quantum drives, because those old drives had the lowest access times around...

[bigben2k]

Good point. With 160 GB/s transfer rate, I don't need the array anymore!

looks like I'm headed for a 19160, with one SCSI HDD.

[gmat]

I'd steer clear from the 19160. Try the 29160N instead. The 19160 is known to have some compatibility problems, and performance issues. The 29160N is not so expensive and it's rock solid. It's the 32-bit PCI version of the 29160 (which is 64-bit PCI). Don't buy a controller you'll want to change in 1 year...

PS: I know lots of ppl who still run happily with their 2940...

[bigben2k]

The 2940 is nice, but if I'm going to jump into SCSI, I think I'll make the effort of going to 160 transfer rate.

Why the 29160N(32bit) and not the 29160(64bit)?

[nuclear]

Well depending on where you are gmat
Here in canada, even taking into account that i already have the scsi controller and the raid controller, it is still way more costly to run scsi drives. One seagate cheetah X15 is still 378$ for the 18g version (second gen) compared to around 159$ for one 60g 7200rpm.

If you have the money to go scsi, cool, that's great, but i don't and there are many who don't too. So IDE raid is still a good solution before going SCSI.

Also i'm really sure that many looking at this site don't have the money to buy SCSI drives, so maybe you could tell me where to look so I find all of those who have scsi :p

If BB2K has the money to go SCSI, then do it, if not, then serial ata (which solves many problem of the current ata standard) is a good solution.

Oh and by the way, i do agree that scsi is better, it's simply that there are alternative that are cheaper that might be able to do the required task.

[gmat]

First, the 64bit version is more expensive. And next, if you don't have a 64-bit PCI slot (those are longer than conventional PCI slots) it's useless.
I *think* you still can use a 64bit card in a 32bit slot (do not take my word for it) so if you plan to get a duallie mobo (on which you'll find 1 or 2 64bit slots) you can buy the 64bit version. But before i'd check thoroughly if it's possible...

(nuclear): i was joking dude. But jokes aside, it's a geek site with ppl who watercool (or worse..) their PC. That is an expensive hobby, to say the least. Ah and i did put the disclaimer: "IF money doesnt count"

[bigben2k]

Let's see...

I can pickup an AN-29160 (64bit) for $189 (without shopping around), and a Fujitsu (yuck!) 160 HDD, with 18 GB for $120. Total: $309 (+ cable, 3.00).

On the other hand, I could pickup 2 SATA drives, and run them off of the A7N8X in raid 0. Cost: about the price of two 20 GB ATA drives($70). Total $140.

The problem is that the SATA configuration would be raid 0 or raid 1 only, not both. Since raid 0 can be fragile, I'd have to choose raid 1, for reliability.

Unless I get a controller that would allow me to do raid 0/1 over 4 drives, then I'm looking at 75 for the controller, and 4*70 for the drives. Total 350 (with 40GB though, in SCSI, that would total 430), and I'm back to ATA, because there's no SATA controller that'll run raid 0/1 out there, yet (right?).

[bigben2k]

Originally posted by gmat
First, the 64bit version is more expensive. And next, if you don't have a 64-bit PCI slot (those are longer than conventional PCI slots) it's useless.
I *think* you still can use a 64bit card in a 32bit slot (do not take my word for it) so if you plan to get a duallie mobo (on which you'll find 1 or 2 64bit slots) you can buy the 64bit version. But before i'd check thoroughly if it's possible...

(nuclear): i was joking dude. But jokes aside, it's a geek site with ppl who watercool (or worse..) their PC. That is an expensive hobby, to say the least. Ah and i did put the disclaimer: "IF money doesnt count"
I checked, and the 29160 is backwards compatible to PCI 32 bit. The price would be the deciding factor, since the only extra with the 29160 is a 68 pin connector for ultra SCSI.

[mo]

Its an undeniable fact that SCSI is superior to IDE. That statement is never in question... The only questionalble item is whether its worth spending the extra money when you need tons of space. (In my case for example 200+gigs).

Most good boards nowadays come with a raid controler capable of both striping and mirroring. IDE drives that have a 8meg cache as far as I can see will not suffer the warranty drop. The price difference between the two is small enough not to matter considering the gains in performance and warranty.

Looking at what I believe to be the best IDE drive on the market today WD1200JB (8meg cache 120gig) at 298 dollars CAD that means you are paying 2.5 dollars per gig. Anything over that in size is still not worth it as the price rises exponentially.

SCSI on the otherhand looks like this. Cost effective units range between 73.4 gigs to 180 gigs at a price tag between 850 to 2300 dollars per device. We're talking about $12.5 PER GIG!!!! For someone buying a new system it also means they need to buy a SCSI controller which will set the person back another couple hundred dollars.

I just dont see the benefits of all this. Thats a LOT of money that can be spent elsewhere for better overall system performance. If you are looking for peak performance you can separate the disks that receive most traffic and give them their own Bus's and RAID the rest (If there is a rest anyways). Use a tiny little harddisk for your swap system and seperate your IDE devices and see how fast they will be. As for noise and heat , Thats extremely easy to resolve especially if you are watercooling. The innovatek HDD matic is just one example as to how you can deal with both at the same time, and there are many many other ways to deal with it.

I just dont see the benefit of SCSI as of yet for day to day usage unless you are running a mission crytical operation (Only one I can think of where the harddisk would be a bottleneck would be a REALLY REALLY busy website, but then you are making so much moola why not spend the money on scsi:) )

[gmat]

Well, for one why saying "i dont see the need of SCSI speed" then talking about setting up ATA RAID ? That is not consistent...
Personnally, as a gamer, and a geek who spends his life on his PC, i attest i *feel* the difference in day-to-day use, and i *suffer* when i get back to an IDE system... Overall "snappiness", cache / swap files loading times, etc.. all improve the overall experience.

BB2K try to stay away from Fujitsu's. They are not reliable, and they are closing their operations in most European countries... Stick to Seagate (Cheetah) or Maxtor (Atlas).
The 19160 has some problems, as i said. There is more than a mere connector on the 29160... Again, you get what you pay for.
Ah also, all boxed adaptecs come with full cables and software.


"I just dont see the benefits of all this. Thats a LOT of money that can be spent elsewhere for better overall system performance. "

Look, i have a watercooled PC with a top CPU, a top GFX card, a flat 19" monitor, a great Hi-Fi, a sports car and broadband access. I wont get back to cheap ass HDDs (and CDROM units as well...)

[mo]

heh. All Im saying gmat is that with the most recent IDE drives, if you run your drives on a separate bus , you will find the difference between SCSI and IDE to be much less noticeable. Thats all. Plus IDE Raid is something I mentioned in passing and only comes up if you need to use many disks. The moment your IDE drives share a bus, (especially OS/application/swap) thats when performance goes downhill. And my opinion applies to me at the end of the day and the choices I make, and was not meant to criticise your choice.. Heck.. I wouldnt mind it if I could afford it:)

[gmat]

Hehe i *always* run my IDE rigs (at work...) like this. But still it's noticeably slower.
Something i forgot to mention is noise. 1 HDD is less noisy than 2 HDDs. Since i'm in the process of building a zero-fan total-silence config, i'm limited to 2 drives (sandwitched around a HD block - aiming at Dtek's one). So it will be a 15K.3 for the speed-hungry things and a 10K.6 for bulky things.
Both drives will be around a HD block, the whole thing silenced with foam and suspended. My goal is to hear the pump.

(edit) to come back to the topic at hand would you trust a 1y warranty on a HDD ? I dont. And S-ATA will have that 1y warranty as well...

[bigben2k]

Gotcha...

I'm clear on the AN-29160. I'll pick the one I can find cheaper, but I'll keep in mind that you recommended the 29160N.

I agree with the HDDs: Fujitsu sucks!!! Since I've always liked Seagate, I'll try to lean towards those. MAxtor probably isn't too bad either, but seeing some results on their 740DX line (ATA), where they turn out to be the most CPU intensive, I'd rather stick with Seagate.

While on the topic of CPU utilization... isn't it true that a SCSI controller will take a load off of the CPU, compared to ATA?

Also, nuclear pointed out that Seagate may offer their SATA drives with a 3 year warranty. Even if that's true, I wouldn't be able to run then in raid 0/1. I don't believe that most mobo manufacturers offer BOTH raid 0 and RAID 1 at the same time. Am I wrong?

Thanks for the cable tip!

[gmat]

Beware, ATA and SCSI lines are completely different, even from the same manufacturer.
Maxtor SCSI line was bought from the then-dead Quantum. So Maxtor drives are dubbed 'Atlas' and the 10K unit is as good as the Seagate one. There are so few differences between the 2 that the choice would be on price only...
For 15K units Seagate is the king, by far. Things may change though, Maxtor announced a new 15K Atlas...

As for CPU load: Wrong, its kinda the opposite.
With SCSI the controller takes the load. Adaptec controllers usually keep your CPU below the 3% bar.
With ATA the mobo chipset takes the load. The problem comes from IDE - a device claims the bus for itself during a transfer, thus blocking the chipset. In use one feels the UI is kinda "freezing" during ATA transfers, thats because all other chipset-related operations (FSB transfers, peripherals I/O..) are down to a halt.

ah the cable: if you happen to buy a nude card (ie "bulk" or "OEM") try to get a rounded cable at Plycon. They are neat.

[nuclear]

BB2K
Highpoint already make a 4 sata channel card, the rocketraid 1540
It comes with 4 sata cable and 4 rockethead (sata to ata-100)

DOH
For the drive, seagate have changed the page and they are now back to 1 year.......
sorry for the misconception
seagate info on ssata drives (http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/personal/family/0,1085,564,00.html)
But they would have been better than the solution from maxtor or WD because they are native sata and not ata-100 converted to sata. If you read the review on lostcircuit (don't have the link for it on hand), they did great.
And also, they do not quote anymore the service life. So it seems they have reduced their waranty on every drive they make (IDE)

By the way GMAT, i know you were joking, as i was too, because in most sig, most have IDE drives :p
Also GMAT, if you use an external card, not the chipset (like a promise card, which is a software raid card) it doesn't use that much cpu, but it might be because i use quantum hd.

[bigben2k]

CPU load: well, that's what I meant:D

3%, that's good, that's what I'm looking for, thanks!

[bigben2k]

Originally posted by nuclear
BB2K
Highpoint already make a 4 sata channel card, the rocketraid 1540
It comes with 4 sata cable and 4 rockethead (sata to ata-100)

DOH
For the drive, seagate have changed the page and they are now back to 1 year.......

So much for the 3 year on SATA...

Ok, so can the Highpoint do raid 0/1? (Raid 0 and Raid 1 at the same time?)


yes it can! (http://www.highpoint-tech.com/rr1540.htm)

[nuclear]

Yes BB2k
highpoint website (http://www.highpoint-tech.com)
It seems to be a good solution. You can hook up 4 HD to it, each having their own channel.
Sorry for bringing the bad news about the drive, it seems they reduced it on october 1st, and the last time i checked before was like the 25th.

/edit
Seems like when I was writting this post, BB2K did an edit on his post
/edit

[bigben2k]

Sorry...

Well, given the load off the chipset, I think I'll still shoot for the 29160/N, and Seagate or Maxtor 160 HDD.

Controller: $189

HDD

Capacity: 9 or 18GB
Interface: ultra160
rot. speed: 7.2krpm, 10krpm, 15krpm. (15krpm quieter, as per gmat!)
Manuf: Seagate, Maxtor and IBM.

I'll look it all up in PriceWatch, and post later.

[gmat]

Ahaha :) It's 22:10 and i did not make the dinner yet.. GRRrrrRr i spent my evening on Pro/Forums. I stop tomorrow. Yes. Thats what i'm gonna do.

nuclear: 4 drives, ouchhhh... wait, wait, you've not tested a F-16 turbine to blow air on your rad yet :D hehe

BB2K: keep in mind that those 70MB/s transfer sessions (on huge files) will put a certain load on your *whole* system, regardless of the interface... And that depends mainly on the OS. An unix will handle that nicely (through pre-emptive multitask... nice your cp or mv commands to +5 or +10)... Windows is another story :p
(edit) 9GB drives dont exist anymore. The min is 18GB, and even those are phased out right now. Look at storagereview.com to know about latest news. And stay clear of IBM !!!

[bigben2k]

Go eat man! (Va manger!)

Ok, I'll stick to:
Capacity: 18GB
Interface: ultra160
rot. speed: 10krpm, 15krpm
Manuf: Seagate, Maxtor

Will report when I have time. Tmo?

[nuclear]

GMAT
It's nothing compared to my 3 seagate 9.1g full height scsi hard drive :P
It can hear it even when i'm at the other side of my appartement when they start, kinda funny :P
but my 3 20g quantum 7200rpm make almost no noise.

[gmat]

whoa. With all that noise, one day you'll go nuts and you'll cut ppl down to pieces with a chainsaw or bomb your neighbourhood. Or you'll become deaf. Are you a Motorhead fan ? :p

BB2K: *burps* ah feels better. So you're up to 3 candidates right now, since Atlas 15K isnt showing up yet:
- Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (in stores this month)
- Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 (in stores next month, IIRC)
- Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (if it's out, i heard it was ready) or else 10K III.

If you're not going to buy it immediately, maybe the Atlas 15K will show up. Could be a serious contender.
Any other drive will be outdated, too noisy, too hot, too slow, or a combo of these options :p (well you know the story...)

(edit) Seagate units have been tested at storagereview, see them there.
Atlas units:
http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/scsi/atlas_15k/atlas_15k/index.htm
http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/scsi/atlas_10k_family/atlas_10k_iv/index.htm

[io331]

Geez all you Adaptec people...

Save yourself some money and some issues with Domain Validation on your SCSI cards.

Look at the Tekram cards or the LSI Logic OEM cards and save yourself some money there...

I am running teh Tekram card myself and am quite happy with it. Since I upgraded to a XP1800+ though I do notice my drives don't seem to be as fast as they were on my K6-III+ box. Guess I should look into some 10K drives....


Best place on the web for you SCSI fix...
www.hypermicro.com


edit - stupid typos

[bigben2k]

All right. The Atlas 15K is rated with a max transfer rate of 75MB/sec, 3.5 ms seek. The Atlas 10K will do 72MB/sec, and 4.3 ms seek.

Lots of info, I'll have to review it in more detail, and check what storagereview.com has to say.

[Arcturius]

Originally posted by gmat
9GB drives dont exist anymore. The min is 18GB, and even those are phased out right now. Look at storagereview.com to know about latest news. And stay clear of IBM !!!

Something nobody has mentioned yet---used drives.
I got an IBM DGVS09U (Ultrastar 9ZX) 9.1GB used off Ebay that I'm more than happy with. Also, if you look around enough, there are still a few 9GB Atlas IV's around NIB for about $80 each--we run them RAID1 in our mail servers at work for OS drives, and put /var and swap on Atlas 10K III's running in RAID5.

And GMAT is absolutely correct--there is no comparison between using a machine with SCSI disks as opposed to one with IDE disks, especially if you make a swap partition beginning at cylinder 0 (sorry Win98 users...).
Even an old, used SCSI disk will in many ways outperform a 'modern' IDE one, and probably outlive it, too.

Oh, and as a personal anecdote, the 64bit adaptec's run just fine in a 32bit slot, as if there were any doubt. ;)

[gmat]

Thx dude :)

About Tekram controllers; they do their job but not as well as Adaptec's. The RISC chip on the board is critical, its power determines the maximum load the controller can take without hampering your CPU. Adaptec RISC controllers are way more powerful. All my experiences with Tekram boards (i have tried 3) were either unsucessful (driver problems with NT) or deceptive (more than 10% CPU load opposed to 3% for Adaptec under the same conditions).
Again you only get what you pay for :p
(oh besides, the latest Tekram U160 is $12 more expensive than the corresponding Adaptec 29160N...)

[bigben2k]

I took a gander at storage review, and decided that the Maxtor 10k3 would be a better choice for me (a user), than the Seagate 10k6. Now all I have to do, is wait for the Maxtor 10k4, and see if it's worth it, or if it'll at least drive the price down on the 10k3 ;)

One thing is clear though, the 160 controller is about to become a requirement, even for a single drive, since the latest drives are about to hit a transfer rate of 80 MB/s, the limit for the previous SCSI spec.

I know Adaptec too well to even consider using something else...

[io331]

Originally posted by gmat
Thx dude :)

About Tekram controllers; they do their job but not as well as Adaptec's. The RISC chip on the board is critical, its power determines the maximum load the controller can take without hampering your CPU. Adaptec RISC controllers are way more powerful. All my experiences with Tekram boards (i have tried 3) were either unsucessful (driver problems with NT) or deceptive (more than 10% CPU load opposed to 3% for Adaptec under the same conditions).
Again you only get what you pay for :p
(oh besides, the latest Tekram U160 is $12 more expensive than the corresponding Adaptec 29160N...)

A year ago when I bought my setup the Tekram card was about $40 cheaper... It was a nice upgrade from my Diamond Ultra card (now used to run a scanner in the "left-overs" PC)...

So far I have been more than happy with my card. Works great under 2000, and of course it seems ALL contollers have problems with XP.

[gmat]

Originally posted by io331
it seems ALL contollers have problems with XP.

Yes. It needs registry hacking, and a good deal of voodoo incantations to get XP to work with SCSI. Anyway, for a personal use, wise persons should stay away from XP...
(for the others, there's a thread on storagereview's forums about it - and may the force be with you...)

[jtroutma]

BigBen:

Its been a while since I have last posted/read this thread BUT I will still throw in my last 2 cents.

I personally have had very good success with Quantum Atlas drives (now Maxtor Atlas SCSI line). As you can see in my sig. I am currently running 5 of their drives in my system; (1) Atlas V and (4) Atlas IV. I have yet to find any complains/problems with them yet and one of the drives has been running in my system for over 4 years now :)


For the rest of you in SCSI land, can anyone recommend a good Adaptec RAID 0 or RAID 5 SCSI adapter that is not affected by FSB OCing? I have an AAA-131U2 w/ 64mb cache sitting here on my desk because I found that using that controller in my system was SLOWER (in max throughput tests) than my AHA-2940U2W w/ software RAID 0. Did some more tests and found that with my FSB @ 150, the card ran slower than @ 133FSB. But even @ 133FSB the Array Adapter (AAA-131U2) was still not as fast as my Host Adapter (AHA-2940U2W) using software RAID 0.

I guess I will keep the Array Controller around for when I move all these 9.1Gb drives into a storage server BUT I am still looking for a good Array Adapter that will work better than my Host Adapter. Suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[Brad]

I don't think is is really a huge issue, just spend a little extra money and get the high end 8mb cache drives with 3 years. All the power users will be doing that, while the average user that doesn't care about performance or a warranty over a year will just buy a 20gb 5400rpm drive anyway.

[gmat]

jroutma: Adaptec are the kings of standard host adapters, but they're lagging a bit behind in the RAID controller segment. Here are the results of a round-up i saw lately (in a french mag):
* LSI Logic / MegaRAID Elite 1650 : best all-around, admin software not working with Linux (but the controller is working OK). Lots of very good options, great performance, etc. The only bad point is it scans the disk array after each configuration change.
* ICP Vortex / GDT 6523 RS : no RAID 3, good software, admin software working perfectly with Linux. Bad point = registry hacking is mandatory to get it to work (covered by user manual).

Mylex and Adaptec controllers finished last...
RAID is a different beast :p And i've seen many other reviews that lead to the same results -> it seems LSI Logic is the way to go. ICP Vortex use an Intel chip and seems quite good as well.
Besides, Adaptec boards are known to be very touchy about PCI clock settings.

The source article is here (put it in babelfish if you cannot read French...):
http://www.01net.com/rdn?oid=191763&rub=3345

[nuclear]

Maybe you can help me gmat
What would be better, 4 used 9.1 g cheetah x15 for 600$ with a scsi card (which i don't need since i have an on board adaptec 39160) or 1 new cheatah x15 36lp 36g for 608 (plus taxes, around 700$)?
thank you

[gmat]

* If you plan to use software RAID, the quad 9.1G drives (1st-gen X15's, 2nd gen start @18 and 3rd gen @36) will outperform a single 36G drive. But at a price:
- heavy CPU load
- possible only with NT (and 2000, try to avoid XP...) or Unix / Linux
- lots (!!!) of noise. It will sound like a jet aircraft turbine (1st gen drives...)
- lots of heat (same reason)
- heavy PSU drain
- depending on your RAID level, reduced capacity (for example ~24GB with striping mirroring and parity)
If you can cope with that, and maybe pick up a RAID controller somewhere you'll live happily in SCSI-RAID land.

* If you plan to use them as 'standalone' drives, to get a total of 36GB you're better off getting that new X15 (it's a X15.3, right ?), by itself it's faster than any other drive, including previous generations of X15's.
- it's silent (3rd gen drive...)
- its blazingly fast
- it's slim (only 1 drive to fit..)
- it wont kill your PSU
- its rather cold (for a 15K HDD...)
Besides you've already got the adaptec board.

To me the choice is rather clear: get that X15.3 :)

[nuclear]

nope, it would be a 2nd gen, 3rd gen still are not on the market in canada.
For the PSU, well it's currently powering 2 athlon 1ghz, with 3 ide hdd 7200rpm and 3 SCSI 7200 rpm (full height) with the hardware raid card. I won't use the hardware raid card on the 4 hdd (if i buy them) because it's really an old model (40mb/s per channel, 3 channel with only 4 megs of cache)

[bigben2k]

In case some of you missed it...

here's a link to the SR thread about using SCSI with WinXP (http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=5833)

MS sucks! (like we don't know that...)

[nuclear]

GMAT
Isn't the size of the X15 series more like
first gen: 4.3 , 9.1 and 18
second gen: 9.1 , 18 and 36
third gen: 18, 36 and 73
So a 9.1 could be a fisrt or second but not 3rd gen.

[gmat]

Nope. 1st gen had 9GB per platter, 2nd gen 18GB and 3rd gen have 36GB per platter bringing the biggest at 144GB (and ~$970 ...)
2nd gen are X15-36ES drives and they come in 18,36 or 72GB flavors.
They all have a 5 year warranty.
BTW 3rd gen (X15.3) is just around the corner... prices have been announced, and 1st-tier reserved models are out. They should show up quite soon.

[nuclear]

isn't it the 10k.6 that goes up to 144g
I just checked on the seagate web site and the 15k.3 goes only to 73g. The size for the 15k.3 are 18, 36 and 73. The 10k.6 goes from 36 to 144
seagate web page for the mainstream server (http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/servermain/)

[gmat]

Mmhh my wrong then. But i'm sure the 2nd gen does not exist in 9GB - i've never seen it anywhere with that size. The only versions of X15-36LP (not ES, ES was the 10k) i'm aware of are 18GB and 36GB. I thought they would have taken the same path as their 10K line...

[bigben2k]

Here's what I found, from SR:
Seagate Cheetah 15k3
ST318453LW/LC 18 GB
ST336753LW/LC 36 GB
ST373453LW/LC 73 GB

Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP
ST318452LW 18.4 GB
ST336752LW 36.7 GB

Seagate Cheetah 10k6
ST336607LW/LC 36 GB
ST373307LW/LC 73 GB
ST3146807LW/LC 146 GB

Seagate Cheetah 36ES
ST318406LW 18 GB
ST336706LW 36 GB

Maxtor Atlas 10k3
KW018L2 18 GB
KW036L4 36 GB
KW073L8 73 GB

In order of (personal) preference, I'd put them in this order:
1-Seagate Cheetah 15k3
2-Seagate Cheetah 10k6
3-Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP
4-Maxtor Atlas 10k3
5-Seagate Cheetah 36ES

(never mind what I posted earlier)

This does not include the Maxtor 10k4, since it hasn't been reviewed yet.

[nuclear]

GMAT
It seems that you are correct in your info. From the information I was able to gather on the seagate website, there has never been a 4.3g first gen nor a 9.1g 2nd gen. It seems the 3rd gen is the only one to have 3 different models of hard drive.
So it would be more of my mistake than yours for the 1st and second gen.
Sorry

[gmat]

n/p dude. Have fun with your 15K.3 :) lucky man.