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4 Hard Drive RAID - SCSI vs IDE

U

UNLTuba

Senior member
I'm in the process of building a server for myself that will include 5 hard drives. The first will be a small (<20GB) boot drive. The other four will be larger (>20GB) storage drives hooked together in a RAID setup. My questions are as follows...
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1) In terms of performance vs price, is SCSI worth it for the RAID setup? the boot drive?
2) How much of a performance increase is an SCSI RAID setup over a IDE RAID setup if any?
3) In terms of reliability, which system (SCSI or IDE) would prove to be more stable in the long run?
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For now, that's all of the questions that I can come up with. I'm sure I'll have more as I get further into this, but right now I'm just scraping the tip of the iceberg. Thanks in advance for your help.

-Eric
 
There is a big performance difference between SCSI and IDE, the question is, will your apps and uses expose this difference? If all you are doing is some minor stuff, go IDE. Otherwise, go SCSI. There is a reason you don't find IDE in real servers.

Whether or not the difference is worth it to you depends on what you are doing. SCSI RAID arrays are quite pricey, with controllers generally costing at least $400, and drives costing upwards of $200 for 18GB. In your situation, it would add up to over $1200. You could get equal storage capacity with IDE for a fracton of the cost.

Marty
 
i concur w/ marty. it depends.

i doubt you want/need scsi raid.

scsi &amp; ide raid have diff strengths. scsi has blazing fast seek/access times &amp; multitasking capabilities.

ide raid has blazing sustained x-fer rates, but does nothing to improve seek/access times.

ide raid is good for when u want to x-fer large files (sustained x-fer), but not when u wanna x-fer a bunch of little files, cuz it doesn't matter how fast the array can x-fer data, if it's spending all its time *seeking*.

scsi rocks at seeking/accessing, which is what your drive is doing when u run an OS, apps &amp; swap/page file.

so, you'd get best perf by getting a small (9 or 18-gig), fast (10 or 15Krpm) scsi beast to run your OS(es), apps &amp; swap/page file, and one or two big-@ss ide drives (60-gigger) to serve large files. make sense?

u can get a 10Krpm ibm 36lzx for $159, with 4.9ms seek at hypermicro.
 
Wow! I didn't know there was an IDE RAID controller that was capable of doing RAID 5. That looks like my best option yet. Thanks for the info, zzzz. As far as my smaller boot drive. I can get a relatively small SCSI drive for pretty cheap, but then I have to pay for an SCSI controller card (can anyone recommend a good, but not too expensive one?). Or, I could get the smallest ATA-100 hard drive I can find (15GB right now, isn't it?) for a little bit more by itself, but maybe all together cheaper than the SCSI set-up. Does it make any sense at all to have an SCSI boot drive and then IDE storage drives? It's not going to be a huge business server quite yet, but I am looking into the idea of moving a small business of mine online in the future. I think that IDE RAID 5 is the way to go for me right now anyway. Perhaps I'll get some 40-60GB WD 60GXP ATA-100 hard drives for the storage aspect of it. I'm just tossing around ideas right now anyway. Thanks again!
 
I got the Adaptec 2400A a few weeks ago but will get around to installing it tonight. I read the in the Storage Review forums that the 3Ware Escalade must use the same drive. By same drives, even the firmware version must be the same. This can be a problem two years from now when a drive dies and you need a replacement that is no longer on the market.

SCSI RAID is great in the office but my ATA RAID is good enough for me since the price is right.

Mylex 352 - $650
2 x U160 Cables - $70
5 x 36GB IBM UltraStar 10K Drives = $2000
Total = $2720

As you can see, the price can really add up for SCSI RAID.


 
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