Thread: SCSI Setup
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Unread 04-14-2003, 11:28 AM   #6
Cova
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Join Date: May 2002
Location: Canada
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Be aware that if you want to run U320 (or even U160) you need pretty expensive SCSI cable too. Either of those speeds requires the twisted-pair 68-pin cables, and though they are cheap relative to the drives, after using $10 IDE cables all your life the price will suprize you at first.

For RAID, you can either go software RAID (striping in WinXP Pro, striping/mirroring/raid5 with 2K Server) or hardware RAID. Unlike IDE with fairly cheap "hardware" raid that is mostly done in the drivers (eg. HighPoint or Promise RAID as integrated on the mb) you will need to buy a real RAID controller for SCSI, which is again going to cost a lost more than a standard RAID controller.

I work with SCSI RAID all the time at work, and ran SCSI for a short time at home, but it's just too expensive and I went back to IDE. IMHO you're better off spending the money on other parts of the system - buy another GB of RAM to use just for caching the IDE drives and you'll probably get similar performance for less total cost.
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