IDE vs. SCSI vs. SATA vs. ?!!?!

[Negatyfus]

One thing that I am not vey clear on is what interface is currently best for what... performance, your wallet, support, stability, etc. My focus is primariry on a gaming rig.

IDE has come a long way, I hear, but SCSI will beat it in performance and won't bog down your CPU. SATA is new, but still an infant-- is worth it in terms of performance? Obviously, you could go all out and build a SCSI RAID array. But I mean, the best choice isn't very clear.

What would you choose for an upper mid-range gaming machine? Is SCSI worth it over IDE? SATA?

 

[phisrow]

One of the most important diffirences is in the spindle speeds that the diffirent busses tend to imply. I think that without exception, or almost without exception, IDE drives are either 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm. SATA drives are mostly 7200 rpm; but you can get 10,000 rpm models (the ever renouned Raptors). SCSI drives can be obtained at speeds up to 15,000 rpm. The performance numbers between an IDE and a SATA drive of equivalent spindle speed should be pretty close to one another; but so should the price per gig. All else being equal, SATA is nicer because the cables are much, much more managable, and it usually costs little or nothing, since most decent motherboards come with it integrated these days. With SATA Raptors, of course, performance is rather better; but price per gig goes up unpleasantly. SCSI is even more like this, painfully expensive, especially for the 15,000 rpm models, and hard to cool; but rather faster again than the competition.
For an upper mid range machine, I would certainly recommend against anything at 5,400 rpm. As many 7,200 rpm SATA drives as you need should do for main storage(music, movies, etc) with some raid thrown in for redundancy if you care. If you have the cash a 10,000 rpm SATA boot/Apps drive would make things go a bit faster. SCSI would be better still, naturally. You should be careful, though, not to skimp elsewhere in your rig in order to pay for nice drives. For example, even the fastest hard drives(excluding various solid state disks that cost more than any 2 upper mid range gaming machines) are going to be a lot slower than system ram. Buy plenty of ram first, and fast drives later.

 

[Thoreau]

For gaming, pick up a nice speedy 74 gig raptor for your system, apps, and games to be installed on. then slap in a monster-sized PATA drive (maxtor, western digital, etc, doesnt really matter) for mass storage. I definitely agree with phisrow on the raid idea when used for data redundancy (raid 1.) I've been running two 160 gig maxtors in raid1 for a while and the peace of mind knowing that a dead drive wont take my data away from is is well worth it.

 

[Negatyfus]

Amazingly, I have never had a drive die on me EVER, but I will consider RAID... HD's aren't that expensive anymore. Integrated SATA sounds nice, but I was a bit concerned about throwing in too many new techs, PCI-e, SATA, etc. How stable and mature is that stuff, anyway? Most new techs take a few generations to really shine.

 

[ThePiston]

I once, like a moron, touched the underside of a HD when it was on and I got a blue screen telling me of hardware failure... dead. . It was a Maxtor,so I only buy WD even though it was my fault .

 

[Negatyfus]

My drive has made VERY LOUD SCREECHING noises when copying large files around. I has had its fair share of bad sectors. But it has NEVER died.

Anyway, somebody told me about problems with SATA when many users are writing to a disk simultaniously... also with video manipulation. Something about IO time-outs. He has no problems with his home system, though. This was a server. This makes me lean towards IDE, even though that Raptor looked sweet.

 

[sharkeeper]

Discussion of interface types is irrelevant for a gaming machine.

Any modern PATA or SATA disk will be more than adequate. Just make sure you have plenty of ram. 1GB is a good start.

Cheers!

 

[dakels]

phisrow basically sums it up.
Drives are the primary reason why disk performance is fast, not the PATA, SATA, or SCSI connector or cable. You can get small benefits from a good controller or cable but it will be small % differences at best. Its spindle speed like 7200rpm, 10k (raptor and scsi), and 15k (SCSI only) which make a drive fast access and transfer.
ATA (PATA) and SATA are about the same but SATA is preferable due to the nice thin cables. The bandwidth is a fraction higher then normal PATA but the chance of you using that extra bandwidth is slim to none in a gaming rig. Prices of SATA and PATA are about the same with SATA often being a few dollars more then the PATA counterpart.
SCSI is considered fast because of the high spindle speed of the drives (10k-15krpm). At 10k, the SATA Raptor (Originally SCSI drives) can often outperform many SCSI drives but marginally. SCSI is also amazingly expensive per gigabyte and nowadays generally only used on high end workstations and servers. SCSI drives at the high spindle speed are often very noisy as well. A rack of 15k drives is not something you want in your bedroom. Its not a pleasant sound either, often being a high pitch whine.

There are some other minor things such as platter arrangement, read/write heads, NCQ, and larger cache which help performance but generally nothing substantial in every day real world performance. In a lab with specified tests to target certain functions, they can show big differences (which are often used for sales numbers) but again, real world is what matters and the most important factor for speed there is RPM.

about any 7200rpm drive is fine for normal use, if you want better performance without being too expensive, go with a Raptor boot/main drive. Striped RAID in most situations won't give you a major benefit, it depends on your style of usage, RAID controller, and drive arrangement.

 

[dullard]

It depends, what do you want to be fast?
1) Do you want your games to play smoothly and have good frame rates? If so forget the hard drive (just get any recent one that fits your budget) and get a computer with good video card, decent CPU, and sufficient memory.
2) Do you want an online game to load a level with the fastest load times so you get the game items before everyone else? If so you need a fast hard drive. This is a good site for hard drive data. Unfortunately the gaming benchmark is getting dated, but you can see that the fastest SATA drives are on par with most of the SCSI drives. But there are a few recent SCSI drives that are on top with one blowing the competition away.

When it comes down to price though, I don't think a map loading 15% faster is worth a couple hundred bucks. But that of course is my personal opinion.

 

[Negatyfus]

Okay, thanks. Good info.