SCSI Drive Speeds.. and some help please!
 

Hi guys..
im trying to get into video capture and i have had over the last 6 months or so various amounts of scsi drives/adaptor cards and so on and im trying to get some more knowledge about it..
at the moment i have about 4 drives, 2 @ 9.1gigs @ 7200 (40mb/s speed i think), 1 @ 18 gigs @ 10k spin (i think thats an 80mb/s drive) and my first bought new drive, @ 36gigs @ 10k spin, this is a ultra 160 drive.
im not 100% sure on what the other drives makes are (a mate has those with a advansys adaptor card... please dont make me go all red!!) and not so bothered about them, but the 18gig drive and the 36gig drive are a bit more special i felt due to the spin speed.
the model numbers are as follows, should this help in anyway with my questions..

80mb a sec drive (18gig) seagate cheetah ST118202LC
160mb a sec drive (36gig) seagate cheetah ST336605LC

if any more information is required, please just ask!
now, here comes the questions..
with a Adaptec 29160LP adaptor card, what speeds should i be expecting from the cards? im going to do a few tests myself to test them as im interested and i love to play about with this type of stuff... i will be using a program called HD Tach and Sandra for benchmarking the drives..
now i have a KG7 board, with 512mbs of ram, geforce 3 ti200, and a 32 bit pci slot (as you would expect, this is just a stand in system at the moment, upgrading very soon) but the card is a 64bit pci card. so another question here is, would it be better for me to get rid of this card and get perhaps the 19160 card that is a 32bit card or what!??? also the 18 gig drive gets very hot (the 36gig drive seems to be quite cool considering) so if i wanted this in my case would it be best to get fans by/near the drives to keep them cool or what? i dont really want it heating everything up in there! i am getting a different case, but i have to wait to get some memory before i can really get everything working.. Also what capture card would be best for me? im going to be capturing video, dvd, tv, pretty much anything i guess and really want a good decent card. i do have an upgrade in process, so when its getting there, i will explain more..
please can someone help me and tell me whats best to do!!
thanks for all the help (in advance!!)
oh and here are the benchmark results for the drives...

read for the 18gig drive = 16.1mb/sec
write for the 18gig drive = 13.4mb/sec
read for the 36gig drive = 45.7mb/sec
write for the 36gig drive = 32.3mb/sec

these are all averages from the start of the drive to the end of the drive, i was using HD Tach v2.61 program to get the results.
i have also tried a Maxtor 120gig ata133 7200 rpm drive and it came out like so

read for the maxtor drive = 40.5mb/sec
write for the maxtor drive = 25.1mb/sec

I think you're results are telling. Since the 18GB drive is so slow and hot I just wouldn't use it. Period.

Rather than go on SCSI, which is a bit expensive, I'd just pick up a board with Serial ATA (NForce2 anyone?) and use adapters on your drives to use them that way. SATA in combination with 7200/10K RPM drives is pretty damn fast. While it is arguably not as fast as SCSI, it should be adequate for your needs.

For cooling drives in a non-watercooled environment I would recommend rigging fans in the front of your case blowing in over the drives. I would also recommend trying to space them in your case (if possible) so that they are in every other slot rather than stacked immediately on each other. There are many cases by Antec, Chieftec, and others that are extremely tall (two removable drive cages, 6xOptical drive slots) that can accomodate you here, and they contain the mounting hardware to rig fans like I described.

If you are considering a custom build with that many drives, I would recommend a full tower case like the AX-01BLD that you can find here:

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...iption=&page=1

You will have plenty of room for all of your gear.

Using both IDE and SATA on some of the NForce2 boards you can have up to eight HDD/Optical drives (IIRC), so perhaps you may not want to go SCSI for that extra little performance boost ....

As far as capture goes, All In Wonder cards are good ... they are what I always recommend and I've never had any complaints from the people I've installed them for. Get the best one you can afford to maximise your system's speed ... and your gaming play-zhure.

all in wonder cards
 

well i wanted to stay away from these as they wouldnt be as fast (to my limited knowlegde) as having a separate graphics card, which is where i would like to go and do.
im wanting to keep things separate because of speed, im a speed freak..
i need the speed for gaming, as i would like the qualititly for capturing..
is there anything out there thats separate that will do what i would like it to do?
i was told to have a look at the pinnical cards, something like the dc10+?

If you want a seperate card, there are many on the market. I don't think there is much of a difference between a strict capture card ... they all pretty much do the same old thing. Just pick one from a company you trust.

As far as video capture goes, I just recomended a Dazzle USB2.0 capture device to a co worker, he got it, and loves it! The workstation its on has some uber powerful quadro4 in it, and he didnt want to replace that video card just so he could capture stuff. So he bought this 200$ box, and it does everything that I think most people would want out of capture'n.

I think it was a the Dazzle Digital Video Creator 150

I am a hard core Matrox Zealot when it comes to DVE stuff (as well as NewTek Video toaster Zealot), but Dazzle's stuff seems pretty damn solid.

Yessss ... Matrox is wonderful for 2D.