Need advice on future scsi setup

[Cynicist]

Right now I have a 320GB Seagate drive. It's doing very well so far and I have no complaints but I'm planning to make a huge upgrade in a few months and I've decided that I want to do as much as I can to minimize HDD bottleneck.

I'm looking at either going with a 74GB 15k rpm scsi drive for storing my OS and essential apps, or going all the way with two 150GB drives. I've been shopping around and the larger drives seem to be around the 300-400$ price range, which I wouldn't mind (considering I'd be paying about the same for my cpu/gpu), but then I see very expensive controller cards as well. I'd appreciate any advice on which way to go OR maybe a nudge towards some quality scsi controller cards. As an fyi, I will be using Linux and Windows XP on this hardware.

Heres what I'm looking at atm,

Fujitsu MAX3073RC 73GB 15,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Hard Drive

Fujitsu MAX3147RC 147GB 15,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Hard Drive



(haven't found any good or reasonably priced controller cards yet)

 

[MichaelD]

SCSI is a complicated beast, and there's a lot more to it than just the hard drives themselves. The drives you linked to are very nice drives, but they are just one part of the puzzle.

Drives
Controller Card
Controller Card bus form factor/speed (PCI-X, PCI-E)
Cabling/termination
Operating System
Power Supply

I'll try to keep this under 5K words.

Older SCSI cards are all PCI-X form factor. The slot is longer than a standard PCI slot. Look at the middle two PCI slots in this pic. PCI-X slots also run a faster and wider bus than PCI. Typically 64-bits/100/133MHz vs 32-bits/33MHz.

Most PCI-X SCSI cards are backwards compatible; they will work in a normal PCI slot. The back part of the card's connector just "hangs off" and isn't connected to anything. But then the card runs at the speed of the PCI slot (slow) not at what it's capable of (fast).

There are PCI-E (PCI Express) SCSI cards, but they are pretty expensive.

You can get good deals on used PCI-X SCSI cards and cabling. Not trying to deter you from playing with SCSI (I did, and before SATA came out it was a huge increase vs. IDE drives) I just want you to know what you're getting into.

SCSI can be a "Money Pit" once you're in for $500, what's another $200? Once you're in for $700, what's another $300? Get it? :evil:

These days, unless you're talking a big 10+ drive SCSI array, you're better off getting a 10K rpm WD Raptor SATA drive to boot from and a big 320GB+ SATA drive for data/programs.

Is a single 15K rpm SCSI drive faster than a 7200rpm SATAII drive? Yep. Your sustained transfer rates will be much higher. But your GB capacity will be lower and at 3x the cost, is it worth it? That's up to you.

It's important to remember that unless a PCI-X SCSI card is in a proper 100/133MHz PCI-X slot, it will never achieve it's rated speeds.

If you can find a cheap, used U320 SCSI card, cable with a terminator and some 15K drives in EBay and want to play, I say go for it. But keep in mind you may not see the speeds you're expecting if you stick it in a standard PCI slot.

Hope this helps somewhat!!

ps
If you have an 8x PCI-E slot on your motherboard, PCI-E SATA RAID cards are very nice, have much easier cabling and very good performance. Example of PCI-E SATA RAID card.

 

[wwswimming]

SCSI can be a "Money Pit" once you're in for $500, what's another $200? Once you're in for $700, what's another $300?

no kidding !

i wanted a SCSI drive in 2003, got a 37 GB U-160. $200+

oops, needed a controller (PCI-X). $150.

oops, need MB that will take that controller (Tyan). $400

OMG, need special case that will take EATX boards. $200

etc.

not the best planned out upgrade in the history of computing-kind.

one big chunk out of the budget.

 

[Cynicist]

Yeah, looking at it again its just too much money. Thanks for all the help you guys.

 

[bob4432]

you need to look at scsi under a different light than what you currently are.

for a card, all you need is a bare u160 card - usually $25-$40 used

and for a hdd, don't get the current get, get 1 yr old (in the fujitsu line this would be the mas series) which hypermicro just had for $69 for 74GB

just know that you are pci bus limited which only affect large file transfers off the card, but you can still move data @ 100MB/s or so, but if you are just using it as a main boot drive, the sata drive you are writing to will still be the bottleneck.

i have been running scsi for a long time, current setup is a lsi u160, fujitsu 15k mau 36GB main drive and a seagate 15k.5 300GB storage drive and it works excellent. the burst is right @ 100MB/s and the str on the fujitsu is ~74MB/s where the str on the 15k.5 is 95MB/s+, but the firmware of the fujitsu seems to work better for desktop usage. and no, i didn't pay retail for this, the 15k.5 was a smoking deal, but even without it, i would still be running a 15k main drive w/ the u160 card.