To SCSI, or not to SCSI...
 

An ever lasting question, at least with me!

I'll be getting an Asus A7N8X dlx mobo, and I've been looking at the following options, for storage:

Option 1) Get a Seagate SATA 80GB HDD, for ~$150

Option 2) Go SCSI, with a Seagate 10k6, 37 GB, along with an Adaptec 29160 controller. ~$360


The SCSI "package" comes with a 5 year warranty, and will dance circles around the poor SATA drive. It will in fact have a 66% higher transfer rate (!).

The SATA option has twice the capacity, but the warranty is only one year, unless I get the "Plus" version, which has a 3 year warranty, but has an ATA-100 interface.



Come to think of it, I think I answered my own question: I don't need the speed, especially given the 1 GB of RAM I have.

Better, yet, go with a scsi raid 0.. talk about blinding speeds!
http://www.computerbits.com/dept/classifieds.html
about a third down that page someone's selling a scsi raid controller for $75... I havn't looked into it to see if it's a quality model, but it's made by Intel, and that's definetly a great price, no matter the quality. If I had any money to buy the scsi drives, I would jump on this in an instant.

Raid0 is definitely out for me: reliability is prime.

Raid0+1 maybe, but with a Cheetah 10k6, I really wouldn't need the speed.

Remember, SCSI will hamper your oc...you'll have to keep the PCI bus @ spec.

oh, then Raid 5 is big pimpin'. I don't like how much space you lose with raid0+1.

But you will notice the speed difference from ide to scsi, and from scsi to scsi raid, especially when booting and loading up programs and games. If you have a gig of ram, your computer won't need to do as much swapping(unless you decide to run an algorithm to solve the stock market, or intensively use photoshop), so that won't be a big issue, but it will help for that, too.

FYI, that card handles raid 5 too.

damn.. maybe I'll just get that card myself.. and sit on it until I can get some scsi drives to set up a raid 0 swap drive. mmm.. ^_^ What an expensive, yet addicting hobby, computing is.

hmm.. It's possible that the scsi raid might not have the same problem that regular scsi has with overclocking.

hmm.. or set it up on a server and connect them with gigabit. But that removes the possibility of booting off of it, or taking it to lans... damn you and your logic, bben!

the a7n8x has the pci lock so he do not have to worry about that

why don't you try a raid 0 on serial ata?? the segate has 8mb cache no?? so it won't be that slow, but not as fast as scsi

He doesn't want raid 0 :(

PCI lock hampers performance :(

But then again, if stability is prime, then why OC?

so you think that raid 0 is not reliable?? i did not know, i though that it was reliable as a normal single ata hdd, or maybe a little less

can you explain why please? i know it may be true, i heard it somewhere else, but never understood why.

Please do not tell me that because you are not overclocking the cards on the pci's, because i can tell you that some cards do not resist the oc :cry:

I can't say for sure, but more importantly, it's not recoverable (!). I would only recomend it for those who have an APC Back-UPS Pro, connected to shutdown on a power failure, and even then, that's a software solution, and that's not reliable either.

Raid 0 is not unreliable. You're decreasing the physical reliability of the virtual drive by 50% because there are now multiple points of failure. Anyways, in my limited experience it's more likely you F--k up something through software than a drive failing.

Neither the single scsi drive is recoverable. Although I'm sure it is a 1000 times more reliable than your average ata drive.

ok i agree to that point, but i have a ups :evilaugh:

but my question is this, why the pci lock hampers performance???

you had to say it is not unrealiable or it is not reliable??? i am confused :shrug:

No no no...

I don't mind loosing a file once in a blue moon, that happens. A single file can be recovered, most of the time.

In a Raid0 array, when something goes bad, you loose the entire array!:eek:

Hara and bb are right, if you have a 4 or even 8 drive raid 0, then the data is spread out evenly on those 4 or 8 drives. Your data will go 4 or 8 times faster, but if one of those drives would happens to fail, 7 drives of beer on the wall.. er.. I mean.. you will lose everything. And when you have that many drives, you have to keep in mind the possibily of one of them dying. Even with a ups, your chances of one of your drives dying can make you pull out all your hair if there's any important data on there.

I was looking at raid 0 only because I already have a fairly large raid 5 to store important stuff, but I wouldn't reccomend it for storing any information you don't want to lose.

But we've gotten off topic; we've started off trying to help ben make up his mind between a couple of drives. If you don't need speed, then I, personally, would opt for a 160Gb eide for nearly the same price as the sata. From what I've read, I don't believe that the serial ata's are all that much better than EIDE, yet.

this site compares a seagate 120gb SATA to a maxtor 80gb EIDE, and it looks like the SATA gets minimal speed increases an has much more cpu utilization.
http://www.lanaddict.com/review.php?ID=57

does your board come with a built in SATA controller?
just mah humble opinion.

BB, the A7N8X has two SATA ports right?

Get a WD RAPTOR, 10K SATA - 36 GB for around $160 and the seagate for storage. Use the Raptor as your boot disk, and will give you a real boost. 8.5ms access time compared with 12-13 for a 7200 IDE.

Desktop use benefits more from lower access times than high transfer rates. Though it has a higher transfer rate than any 7200rpm drive. It also comes with a 5 year warranty, so any crucial data can be stored there, along with windows and apps, with mp3s and so on, or whatever on the seagate.

Hope this catches your eye, as it's probably what I'll be doing and seams like the best of both worlds.

8-ball

PS, for more info on the RAPTOR, head over to www.storagereview.com

Yes, the Asus A7N8X comes with SATA connectors, but not in RAID. It uses the Silicon Image Sil3112 chip.

8-ball: that's not a bad idea, but I think I'll start with the Seagate, and upgrade later, if I need it. Good call.

The thing is, I don't particularly care for WD.

To all: www.storagereview.com is THE site for HDD info (I just wished they tested more drives!).

The western digital SE caviar series (8mb) is another series of drives you might consider. S-ATA is not that so viable TODAY IMO (not in a couple of months time tho).

Another option is a 15k rpm scsi drive (if you can afford it) :D

You mean a bad sector can ruin an array? :eek:

Couldn't be

Believe it: you loose everything.

I think that if anything, I might go for the Seagate Barracuda V that's got the three year warranty, and comes with the IDE ATA-100 interface, if the mobo doesn't come with the SATA power adapter.

can anyone answer my question please? :cry: :cry:

the warranty means they will replace the drive itself if it dies, they will not replace any of your data. Now, companies that give 5 year warranties generally build good products, too.

i think the seagate barracuda V is a good option with 8mb cache also.

if i were you, i would get an sata since your mobo has sata connectors

That's going to depend on two things:
1-is the SATA power adapter included? (do you know that these darn things sell for as much as $25?)

2-Which has the lowest CPU usage?

Ben I dont mean to trash you here, but you are on crack!

One sector does NOT loose everything, and 99% of the time it doesnt loose anything. You forget the fact there is a massive ring of "spares" on all SCSI and most current ATA disks where "defective" or "marginal" sectors data is remapped to. this happens in the background, and without warning. Some disc's come out of the box with a dozen or more remapped sectors already.

Any raid controler ( for scsi atleast) is very good at recovery of something as small as a bad sector.

Sector remapping is nothing new, and its being used in most new drives being made in ATA land... it used to be a fringe benifit for SCSI drives ( which is why when you Low Level a SCSI drive bad sectors seem to dissapear some times since durring a low level a read test is done and any marginal sectors are remapped. Now this only works for so long until you have problems (run out of spares) but by then the SMART or SCSI equiv. will throw errors letting you know there is more bad sectors than normal and the drive is about to die.

all this FUD about RAID 0 vs a single drive is BS. Heres my theory... i run a pretty large 100 GB array athome, built out of 9.1GB SCSI drives.. its RAID 0. Now if you take the whole... "% risk" factor and work it in, it would seem that only a fool would run an array with that many discs in RAID 0. Well I am a big Anti RAID 5 zealot... I think RAID 5 is the biggest POS ever. ( its all about the 1/0) So I just do backups.

Yep folks... Backups. I am a true Backup fiend.. I have owned 2 35/70DLT drives and now I am looking at buying a 100/200 LTO or SDLT drive in the near future. Because I believe that you can use RAID 0 perfectly safe ( even in real big arrays) if you protect your data some other way. If all you keep on the array is pr0n, then no big loss, you just surf a newsgroup and 15 min later you got your gigs of pr0n back. My data on that array is mostly my application pool and CD image pool ( its 95% full). SO its something I dont want to loose since theres a ton of data on it.

Err I have gotten pretty off topic... So My vote is ... RAID0 the beyatch and just burn the goodies to DVD, or spin it to Tape once a month. the chance of an unexpected failure is not to high, but if it happens you atleast have something to fall back on.

Also.... if you run a chaching RAID controler MAKE SURE you have a battery backup on the controler or a UPS with a shutdown system setup on your box. That CAN total an array, if a controler is powered down out of no where while it still had data cached it was writing. Seen that happen too many times.

so a nice APC SmartUps ( what I have on my server) with the shutdown service on the server, so if you loose power it does a controled shutdown.

ok on that i can't answer you. i surrender lol :rolleyes:

True that, true that (except for crack ;) ).

I was referring to data corruption beyond the loss of a sector, and I was not including SCSI, but specifically referring to SATA or IDE in Raid0.

I don't have time to make regular backups, so it's just not an option for me.