Maxtor Atlas 15K

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: Kensai
I was never really updated with the new gen ones. Just the past ones.

No problem. So I (personally), if I were to have that budget for a drive subsystem for a personal machine, would still buy three 36GB drives and a decent controller card. You'd get fault tolerance, screaming speed because the drives are fast to start with, and ~70GB of storage instead of ~50GB, which is plenty for the OS and all the programs I'd ever need. Controller overhead would also be a little less, not that that would matter much in the end.

There's a notable lack of PCIe SCSI controller cards out there from the big manufacturers. If they ever make them, lots of people will have to dump even MORE money on motherboards, because they'll want at least one 8x-16x slot for a graphics card, plus another 8x for IO-intensive stuff like SCSI. It's more likely, I think, that SCSI for anything really intensive will remain the province of servers and high-end workstations.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Actually, there are PCI-E SCSI cards out. I was playing with one that my uncle sent me. 🙂
Not retail yet though.

~Promise has admitted that some of their controllers have problems which cause speed reductions with 3 drives in a RAID 5 array, versus 4 drives.

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: Kensai
Actually, there are PCI-E SCSI cards out. I was playing with one that my uncle sent me. 🙂
Not retail yet though.

~Promise has admitted that some of their controllers have problems which cause speed reductions with 3 drives in a RAID 5 array, versus 4 drives.

There's no question that RAID 5 has an inherent amount of overhead to overcome, especially for writing. This is best overcome by adding drives if you can swing it, because the extra drive heads can eventually overcome the disadvantage. Also, you basically get much more storage for your buck that way, because you still only waste one drive's worth of storage for the parity info, no matter how many drives you add.

Of course, all of that gets expensive, and you need to buy better and better controllers to handle that many drives well. I once saw Mathias99 refer to an eight-way RAID 5 setup, which would be out of the reach of most people.

Edit: I also don't claim to be an expert on the use of RAID for home machines anyway. I've used it plenty on servers at work, but if I were to dip my toe in the SCSI waters at home, I'd probably just get a single fast drive and use it as a system drive. I'm not that demanding.

 

[Markfw]

No sense on going raid5, its slower. Since its the OS (not storage) just get 2 or 3 in raid0 for pure speed ! You need PCI-X to really enjoy the speed SCSI can provide, along with a good hardware raid controller (see sig)

 

[Cheesetogo]

Originally posted by: 6000SUX

Originally posted by: Kensai
Actually, you'll want four drives for RAID 5. 3 drives is underperforming in RAID 5.

Actually, RAID 5 is always "underperforming" compared with something like RAID 0. People use it specifically for its combination of data redundancy and decent performance, plus the fact that it doesn't waste as much space as RAID 1. The drive I recommended has a 3 ms seek time and throughput of 98 Mbps, so I assume you're recommending RAID 5 mostly for fault tolerance-- or because you don't know??? The guy started by saying he wanted a fast system drive, and you're recommending he buy eight hundred dollars' worth of hardware (including a decent controller card).

How does raid 5 not waste as much space as raid 1? Isn't raid 5 four drives that are all redundant of each other?

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: Cheesetogo
How does raid 5 not waste as much space as raid 1? Isn't raid 5 four drives that are all redundant of each other?

Google. RAID 1 (with two drives) wastes 50% of the space. RAID 5 wastes about the total amount of space of one drive in the array. I'm not going to explain why.

RAID 5 requires three or more drives, not exactly four. You could theoretically use a thousand drives in RAID 5, and get failure protection with almost 100% drive capacity. However, the likelihood of more than one drive failing in this setup would increase, and RAID 5 only protects against a single drive failing at a time.

Incidentally, when a drive does fail in RAID 5, performance goes WAY down due to increased disk access on the remaining drives. It once happened at a company I was at that this extra load (on a database server over the weekend) caused a second drive to fail! Kaputski.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Last time I checked, you couldn't do a 3 drive RAID 0. I wouldn't mind learning how though. 🙂

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
No sense on going raid5, its slower. Since its the OS (not storage) just get 2 or 3 in raid0 for pure speed ! You need PCI-X to really enjoy the speed SCSI can provide, along with a good hardware raid controller (see sig)

now you are telling the op he needs a new m/b, just get a u160 card and the drive and you will notice the difference and still be in a reasonable amount of $$$

Markfs900, your system spec kick @$$, but i don't think the op wants to invest ~$1000(conservative) just to benefit from scsi

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: Kensai
Last time I checked, you couldn't do a 3 drive RAID 0. I wouldn't mind learning how though. 🙂

You can stripe over as many drives as you want, as long as the controller supports it. Even the built-in nForce4 controller will stripe over more than two SATA drives, I'm pretty sure. I've never tried, though.

I wasn't recommending RAID 0, anyway. He'd be better off with a single drive. I was saying that if I were to choose RAID 5 in his situation, I'd choose three late-model bigger drives instead of four older small ones for the same money.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: Markfw900
No sense on going raid5, its slower. Since its the OS (not storage) just get 2 or 3 in raid0 for pure speed ! You need PCI-X to really enjoy the speed SCSI can provide, along with a good hardware raid controller (see sig)

now you are telling the op he needs a new m/b, just get a u160 card and the drive and you will notice the difference and still be in a reasonable amount of $$$

Markfs900, your system spec kick @$$, but i don't think the op wants to invest ~$1000(conservative) just to benefit from scsi

Thats why I said just get 2 or 3 drives (my first sentence) I was saying that to see the speed from a 4 or 5 drive array, you would need PCI-X.

And Yes, you can have up to (in my case ) 31 drives in raid 0, or more if the controller supported it. I have 5 in raid0, and I get about 200k sutained read/write. I may be upgrading to 15k drives and a U320 controller. Right now I am using a U160 caching controller.

 

[Vegitto]

Wow! Thanks for all of the replies. I'll think I'll put two in Raid 0, for extra speed. Again: It's not about how many I can put on the drive, it's about how fast I can read from it. I have some storage babies planned 🙂. Why waste on SCSI super-fast drives for storage? Those drives'd be used for movies and such 😀.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Vegitto
Wow! Thanks for all of the replies. I'll think I'll put two in Raid 0, for extra speed. Again: It's not about how many I can put on the drive, it's about how fast I can read from it. I have some storage babies planned 🙂. Why waste on SCSI super-fast drives for storage? Those drives'd be used for movies and such 😀.

did you not understand what i said? a newer gen 15krpm u320 scsu hdd will have a str of ~ 90MB/s. the max theoretical for the pci bus is 133MB/s, in the real worls expect ~120MB/s so if i understand this correctly either you are getting a different motherboard or you are going to spend about 3x as much for ~30MB/s? besides if you are moving the data to a pata or sata drive, they can only move at ~60MB/s for the newest faster ones. raid, in your case will be a total waste of money. don't expect to get #'s like Markfw900 unless you have a serious server/workstation m/b with pci-x.

 

[mechBgon]

If you did want a reasonably quiet drive, swap in some Cheetah 15k.3's instead, if you can find a good buy on them. They have fluid bearings and idle pretty quietly, and the seek noise is not a lot different from a Hitachi 7200rpm ATA drive, if you've heard one of those. Audible, but not too bad 🙂

I assume you know to opt for 68-pin drives so you don't need 68-to-80 adapters? edit: nm, you said 68 in your first sentence 😱 more... coffee... needed!

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: Vegitto
Wow! Thanks for all of the replies. I'll think I'll put two in Raid 0, for extra speed. Again: It's not about how many I can put on the drive, it's about how fast I can read from it. I have some storage babies planned 🙂. Why waste on SCSI super-fast drives for storage? Those drives'd be used for movies and such 😀.

did you not understand what i said? a newer gen 15krpm u320 scsu hdd will have a str of ~ 90MB/s. the max theoretical for the pci bus is 133MB/s, in the real worls expect ~120MB/s so if i understand this correctly either you are getting a different motherboard or you are going to spend about 3x as much for ~30MB/s? besides if you are moving the data to a pata or sata drive, they can only move at ~60MB/s for the newest faster ones. raid, in your case will be a total waste of money. don't expect to get #'s like Markfw900 unless you have a serious server/workstation m/b with pci-x.

Even with a 120MB/sec bus limitation, SCSI still retains very low seek times and properly-working command queueing, which probably are the main reasons for their snappy, responsive feel, not the STR. I have a work task where my old Cheetah 15k.3 mops the floor with my fancy-pants Barracuda 7200.8 by a factor of about 2 to 1, bus limitations or not :evil:

Cat drive > Fish drive 😀

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: Vegitto
Wow! Thanks for all of the replies. I'll think I'll put two in Raid 0, for extra speed. Again: It's not about how many I can put on the drive, it's about how fast I can read from it. I have some storage babies planned 🙂. Why waste on SCSI super-fast drives for storage? Those drives'd be used for movies and such 😀.

did you not understand what i said? a newer gen 15krpm u320 scsu hdd will have a str of ~ 90MB/s. the max theoretical for the pci bus is 133MB/s, in the real worls expect ~120MB/s so if i understand this correctly either you are getting a different motherboard or you are going to spend about 3x as much for ~30MB/s? besides if you are moving the data to a pata or sata drive, they can only move at ~60MB/s for the newest faster ones. raid, in your case will be a total waste of money. don't expect to get #'s like Markfw900 unless you have a serious server/workstation m/b with pci-x.

Even with a 120MB/sec bus limitation, SCSI still retains very low seek times and properly-working command queueing, which probably are the main reasons for their snappy, responsive feel, not the STR. I have a work task where my old Cheetah 15k.3 mops the floor with my fancy-pants Barracuda 7200.8 by a factor of about 2 to 1, bus limitations or not :evil:

Cat drive > Fish drive 😀

i know that, that is why i am suggesting 1 15k scsi drive and not raid. i am all for 1 15krpm scsi drive but think raid 0 in 32bit pci slot is a total waste since you don't gain much for the price of a 2nd drive and raid card

 

[mechBgon]

Good point, I would skip the RAID0 too. Sorry I'm comprehension-challenged this morning 😱 Wait, it's not morning either! :Q

For some types of stuff, having the drives independent is handy, like small video-capture projects where you can pull from one drive and save to the other.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Good point, I would skip the RAID0 too. Sorry I'm comprehension-challenged this morning 😱 Wait, it's not morning either! :Q

For some types of stuff, having the drives independent is handy, like small video-capture projects where you can pull from one drive and save to the other.

no probs. totally agree, when i go 15k i will just put my 10k as a 1 instead of 0 on the link 🙂

 

[Vegitto]

Thanks, all! So, what drive should I get? I had made up my mind, but you guys changed it. Should I get one or two, and what size(s) should it (they?) be?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Vegitto
Thanks, all! So, what drive should I get? I had made up my mind, but you guys changed it. Should I get one or two, and what size(s) should it (they?) be?

personally i use a 36GB system drive - it has more than enough room for all my programs and a couple games with room to spare. the new 15krpm gen just came out and i have seen the 36GB at newegg for ~$230. there are reviews on them over at storage review.

i currently use a fujitsu 10krpm and really like it, not loud at all. in the past i have used maxtor with their atlas II/III line and a friend of mine uses some seagate 15krpm drives. i couldn't say anything bad about any of those and would honestly probably use just about any manf scsi drive, especially the newest gen.

i guess the question would also be to either get the newest generation or a one gen old. maybe others can pipe up, i personally wouldn't mind getting a one gen old, because with the 15k drives the seek time is awesome on even a gen older drive's seek times are ~ 3.5ms. screaming...

also, i would look in the fs/ft forums for either a lsiu160 card or an adaptec 19160, 29160 or 39160. all you need is a 19160 but sometimes the 29160 or 39160 is just as cheap. hopefully the card will come with a u320 cable w/ terminator. if not, take a look at ebay, the last u320 cable i bought was on ebay and i think i paid $10/shipped w/terminator. it was a flat ribbon type, not a rounded one, but it was only $10. being scsi you can hook up a lot of drives in the chain and the cables you can get are long, my current cable is ~48" with 5 connectors on it.

i have asked in another thread about a 80->68pin adapter and got a response that there was no performance difference if you use a 80 pin drive and put the adapter, if that is true, which i do not know for sure but somebody else may know for sure, you may be able to pick up a 15k 80pin(sca) drive off ebay pretty cheap. i just saw one on ebay, a one gen older fujitsu 15k(mas series), 18GB, 8MB 80pin drive go for ~$65 including shipping. not a bad deal at all.

 

[Zepper]

Which Maxtor 15k are you talking about? The current version should cost considerably more than a Raptor, size for size. Must be an older generation if it costs less.
. IAC, I like SCSI so if you can deal with the noise and heat, go for it.

.bh.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Vegitto
I'm thinking of buying a SCSI (68-pin wide) Maxtor Atlas15K 18GB harddisk. Also, I'd need to buy a SCSI expansion slot, because my MOBO doesn't natively support SCSI. I have 2 questions:

1.) Is buying one of these HD's even worth it?
2.) Is there a noticable difference between a SCSI drive that is natively supported and a SCSI drive that is on an expansion slot?

Thanks in advance.

You really need to pay attention to what drive you're actually looking at. The Atlas 15K is over two years old. Get a current generation model. If 36G is enough for you, you can get the fastest drive out there, the Fujitsu MAU for $207 on ZipZoomFly:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100099-1

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: Vegitto
I'm thinking of buying a SCSI (68-pin wide) Maxtor Atlas15K 18GB harddisk. Also, I'd need to buy a SCSI expansion slot, because my MOBO doesn't natively support SCSI. I have 2 questions:

1.) Is buying one of these HD's even worth it?
2.) Is there a noticable difference between a SCSI drive that is natively supported and a SCSI drive that is on an expansion slot?

Thanks in advance.

You really need to pay attention to what drive you're actually looking at. The Atlas 15K is over two years old. Get a current generation model. If 36G is enough for you, you can get the fastest drive out there, the Fujitsu MAU for $207 on ZipZoomFly:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100099-1

that is a good price on that drive 😉

 

[Vegitto]

Agreed. I really like those prices, but I don't live in the USA. Shipping and handling would cost more than the drive itself. I got it from http://www.azerty.nl .

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Vegitto
Uhm.. 1 thing: I do NOT care how loud it is. And actually, this drive was cheaper than a similair Raptor at my local e-tailer.

Then I say go for it! Just keep a second 160-250gb HDD connected for long term storage of downloads, MP3's, Pictures and Programs that don't get as used as frequently(I.E. utilities like adaware, spybot, etc) as your games. Install your games and OS on the 15k SCSI drive along with frequently accessed programs like Antivirus and PHOTOSHOP.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: 6000SUX

Originally posted by: Vegitto

Originally posted by: Kensai
Hell, get 4 of them and stick them in RAID 5. You will see a pretty nice performance increase.

That's a fvcking good idea. Maybe I'll do that. Thanks, Kensai.

I assumed you were on a budget because of the drive you picked. If I were to spend so much, I'd probably just get three of these and a decent controller and call it a day.

if you get the scsi setup, just get a u160 card since a 32bit pci slot can only move at 133MB/s. look for a used adaptec 19160, 29160 or 39160 or the lsiu160, you should be able to pick up the card for ~$40-$50, then you need a u320 cable with a terminator. depending on which hdd it is, some of the 15krpm drives have a str of ~90MB/s and the seek time is awesome. also, imo, one you go scsi you never go back

i really like these, it will be my next scsi drive 🙂

Yep, Fujitsu makes some of the fastest SCSI drives out there and the ususly cost less than the competitions for the latest generation.

one (once) you go scsi you never go back

[*] SCSI is like going from Dial UP internet to getting a CABLE modem for the first time.
[*] LSI Logic makes some of the fastest SCSI cards out there and they Offer one in PCI-express x4 version that is compatable with MSI and DFI nFORCE4 motherboards
4x PCI-express SCSI Host Bus Adapter from LSI Logic. (LSI Rocks!)