Need SCSI explanation

[Triidantinary]

I have adaptec pm2865u3 ( http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/suppor...%2FProduct%2FPM2865U3&prodkey=PM2865U3 ), and in the next week, I'm either selling it, or getting some drives for it, since its been sitting in a drawer for almost a year, since i got it for helping some dude move. however, every time i get on ebay, all the different terminology confuses me, then i look at buying cables, and they're like 50 bucks alone, then terminators, and then my head hurts. i have a 64mb ram chip on the card, but other than that, its a bare card, i dont have any cables or anything, its a PCI-X connection, but its going into a standard PCI slot, which I do know its compatible (it was in another computer with drives working before my friend gave the card to me). i know its U-160, but the whole SCSI-2, wide, and all that, confuses me (although i do know that wide is only 80mb/sec, or something along those lines, so its not what i should buy)

okay, basically, im going to go on ebay and buy a bunch of either 9gb, 18, or a couple 36gig (prolly two or four 18gigs in raid), i just need to know whats what, so i can buy something that will actually get me some speed, and not just overpriced storage

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Triidantinary
I have adaptec pm2865u3 ( http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/suppor...%2FProduct%2FPM2865U3&prodkey=PM2865U3 ), and in the next week, I'm either selling it, or getting some drives for it, since its been sitting in a drawer for almost a year, since i got it for helping some dude move. however, every time i get on ebay, all the different terminology confuses me, then i look at buying cables, and they're like 50 bucks alone, then terminators, and then my head hurts. i have a 64mb ram chip on the card, but other than that, its a bare card, i dont have any cables or anything, its a PCI-X connection, but its going into a standard PCI slot, which I do know its compatible (it was in another computer with drives working before my friend gave the card to me). i know its U-160, but the whole SCSI-2, wide, and all that, confuses me (although i do know that wide is only 80mb/sec, or something along those lines, so its not what i should buy)

okay, basically, im going to go on ebay and buy a bunch of either 9gb, 18, or a couple 36gig (prolly two or four 18gigs in raid), i just need to know whats what, so i can buy something that will actually get me some speed, and not just overpriced storage

Sell it, and buy a 120GB IDE drive for $40 or so that they sell for nowadays. You'll have simple, fast, efficient storage, it won't cost much of anything, and it will just work with no issues and without you having to worry about how RAID works, the fact that if one drive fails your entire array fails in RAID0 setups, and much more. 4 18GB drives in RAID5 only would give you 54GB in storage; that's not much by today's standards, and for a workstation (particularly with older generation SCSI technology) won't give much of a speedup anyway....nevermind that you'll have to actually find a place to put FOUR hard drives.

Or get a SATA Raptor 10,000 RPM drive if you really need the speed. The 72GB drive is the speed champion, even though most benchmarks barely show any difference between that and most 7200 RPM drives for things in Windows.

Hopefully the other parts of your computer that can be upgraded to minimize disk usage (namely, RAM) are upgraded - in other words, hopefully you have 1GB or more of RAM. That would make a significant difference in speed.

Doing that will give you speed, and not overpriced storage.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Triidantinary
I have adaptec pm2865u3 ( http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/suppor...%2FProduct%2FPM2865U3&prodkey=PM2865U3 ), and in the next week, I'm either selling it, or getting some drives for it, since its been sitting in a drawer for almost a year, since i got it for helping some dude move. however, every time i get on ebay, all the different terminology confuses me, then i look at buying cables, and they're like 50 bucks alone, then terminators, and then my head hurts. i have a 64mb ram chip on the card, but other than that, its a bare card, i dont have any cables or anything, its a PCI-X connection, but its going into a standard PCI slot, which I do know its compatible (it was in another computer with drives working before my friend gave the card to me). i know its U-160, but the whole SCSI-2, wide, and all that, confuses me (although i do know that wide is only 80mb/sec, or something along those lines, so its not what i should buy)

okay, basically, im going to go on ebay and buy a bunch of either 9gb, 18, or a couple 36gig (prolly two or four 18gigs in raid), i just need to know whats what, so i can buy something that will actually get me some speed, and not just overpriced storage

Warning: Last driver update from Adaptec for that controller was five YEARS ago. I wouldn't touch it with a pole - even if you can get it fully working in XP/2003.

 

[Triidantinary]

wow, i totally missed that driver thing. i have a gigabyte of kingston hyperx, and plenty of storage (160, and im ordering another, larger drive in a few weeks), athlon 64 3200+. i'll go ahead and throw this card on ebay, i saw the same model go for 130 a few months ago, and put it towards a new vid card

i am sorta bummed out over this, i was looking forward to at least getting a taste of scsi

 

[mechBgon]

Big picture: that is not a no0b card, and dclive has a point about the relative value of lots of storage for cheap $$ too.

If you do decide to do the SCSI route anyway for performance thrills, then you want the latest-generation 15k SCSI drives, which would be Seagate Cheetah 15k.4, Maxtor Atlas 15k II, and Fujitsu's MAU-series. They will be Ultra320 SCSI, which will work with your U160 card. Get 68-pin drives so you don't have to fuss with funky adapter things.

Those won't be cheap, figure about $240-$300 for a 36GB model. But if you want serious I/O performance, then the nastier the load, the better they'll resist ATA-style bog-down. My ageing Cheetah 15k.3 is still about twice as fast in some I/O-intensive work tasks as my brand-new 7200.8 SATA NCQ 8MB-cache drive. Nice try, ATA :evil: The current-gen 15k drives would be even faster.

You would need an Ultra160 or Ultra320 cable & terminator for that plan. Notice I've said nothing about RAID, I would skip the whole RAID thing and run multiple drives as independent entitites if it were me.

Hope that helps

 

[Triidantinary]

well, I really cant afford the price for new drives, so i'll just sell the card, i'll get better performance (in games at least) with a new video card, last question, though, would i be better off posting this card on this forum's sell forum or ebay?