2 Questions about adding scsi drive

[rykyc]

Hi all,

I need to add a second hard drive to my workstation. i currently have a 18.2GB, 68 pin, Ultra 160 7200rpm fujitsu drive. my questions:

1. searching online, it seems that the 10K rpm drives are priced comparable to the 7200 rpm drives. is it ok to mix 10k drives with a 7200rpm drive? are there any performance issues, like the case of IDE drives (where i was told that the speed of the channel will default to the speed of the slowest device on the channel)?

2. any recommendations on model/manufacturers for an 18GB drive would be most welcome.

thanks in advance,
rik

 

[Lorne]

1. A 7krpm drive will work fine, As with IDE you need to keep the same type together, If you are using a U2W or U160 and you hook up a plain UW your U2/U160 will be restrickted down to the UW range if you have surpassed it.
the only differences in IDE to scsi now are scsi takes less CPU usage and 15 devices to a standard controller.

2. sorry, Cant help you there.

 

[Goosemaster]

Rpm's have no effect except in RAID(that should be obvious)..it's like putting a 5400rpm and 7200rpm on the same channel, they'll fight for the bandwidth, but that is IDE's fault..SCSI will be fine....

Make sure, as LORNE said, make sure not to mix LVD ( Low Voltage Differential(Ultra2/Ultra2wide/ultra160)) and other older divices or the bus will default to speed of the lower devices such as scsi2 or ultrascsi...

AS for models, get a Quantum(now maxtor) Atlas 10KII or 10kIII drive from hypermicro.com...great drives..get 10,000rpm drives regardless..7200 is just too slow to warrant the cost of scsi.

If it will be for storage, I recommend an IDE drive.I do the same(Click FATONY in my sig.) It is cheaper per gigabyte for storage perposes...it will not have the os on it, so access time speed is not important, and trust me, my workstation is FAST.

By the way, don't count on Fugitsu for support(although they have good drives) because they have long-since scrapped their Hardrive sector.

 

[Crazee]

Fujitsu scrapped their IDE hard drive manufacturing but they have no plans on exiting the SCSI market. I would recommend Seagate for SCSI drives. I am not a big fan of their IDE drives but the SCSI drives are awesome.

 

[PH0ENIX]

Like other people have said, adding another drive will not affect the performance of your first drive unless they're either;
a) in an array
b) the existing drive is LVD and you add an SE drive. This will cause the bus to switch to single-ended mode, and slow your LVD drive quite dramatically.

As for manufacturers, as far as SCSI is concerned Seagate has to take the crown - aside from a few personal preferences I dont think you'll find many people here will disagree.

The comment about Seagate's IDE drives - it's true that they weren't very flash back in the days of the Conner takeover, and the next couple of years following.
Nowadays, however, they make some damn good drives. They're quiet, highly resiliant against kinetic shock, and not too shabby in speed either.

There's probably at least some truth to the theory that many drives are created equal - ie; the drive is assembled and then they worry about whether it's going to be IDE/SCSI, how much cache, etc.

Good luck, anyway...

 

[rykyc]

hi again,

first of all, thanks everyone for all the replies, very helpful and very informative. for e.g, i didn't know that the LVD thing was an issue. i looked up the specs for my current drive(http://hdd.fujitsu.com/global/drive/mag3xxx/catalog.html , my drive is the MAG3182MP), and i do have an LVD drive.

the new disk is going to be used mostly for data storage, and i had initally thought of doing what one of the replies suggested, which was to get an IDE drive. but then i read that mixing IDE and SCSI hard drives requires some work, since the boot sequence by default looks at the IDE drive for booting up, rather than the scsi drive. since i don't have any IDE devices on my box currently(my cdrom is on the secondary SCSI channel, hard drive on the primary channel, that's how the box arrived from Dell), and since this is my development machine at work, i didn't want to mess around with the configuration.

so basically, what i gather from all the replies is that i should an LVD 10k drive. I was thinking of getting the OEM fujitsu drive from newegg.com, but i guess i'll go with a quantum or seagate. Any feedback regarding what kind of problems to look out for would be very welcome. i'm assuming that getting just an OEM drive should be ok, the box already has power supply connections and scsi connectors.

thanks again,
rik