RAID 0: 2 IDE drives vs. 4+ SCSI drives

[tcrosson]

I've got a Promise FastTrak 66 RAID controller and an AMI 2 channel UW SCSI RAID controller (32MB Cache).

Would I be better off with a couple of fast IDE drives or 4+ SCSI drives?

I'm leaning towards SCSI since 2 good/fast 10GB IDE drives will run me about 110 each. Or I could go with 4+ UW SCSI Atlas II's for $40 a piece (all new). I understand the newest IDE drives are faster than older SCSI drives but I don't think they handle RAID as well as SCSI. Also 4 SCSI drives should out perform 2 IDE's in RAID 0 anyway, right?

- It will be used more for video editing (tapes to MPEG2/4) on my soon-to-be-bought AIW Radeon where encoding MPEG2/4 is quite time consuming (from my experience)
- I don't care about redundancy for the above reason and I backup anyway
- Also space isn't as much of a concern as speed is (20GB should be plenty for me)
- The rest of my system is pretty up to date so I don't think I'd get more performance out of upgrading anything else in my system (Athlon 750 w/256 RAM).

I'd be saving money by going to SCSI so my ultimate question is: Are the extra SCSI drives going to be worth it?

Please help me decide. I'm at a deadlock.

 

[Ben]

Well, this is my opinion

IDE RAID is NOT HARDWARE

But, as you'll see by reading this thread, many people are quite happy with their IDE RAID setups.

I would like to add that the performance that you'll get from the SCSI RAID setup is going to rely on the controller you use, as well as the hard drive. I'm not familiar with AMI, so I don't know if it's good or not.

There's also a good article here Ultra100 vs. RAID 160

Ben

 

[tcrosson]

Anyone else?

 

[tcrosson]

Help please...

 

[zetter]

My opinion: Go SCSI. Especially since you've got a hardware RAID card already.

 

[Sunner]

SCSI since you already have a card.
I dont know about that particular card, but AMI makes alot of good SCSI cards, so I dont see why that particular card shoud be any different.

 

[cfunk]

Just remember, the more channels you have on the SCSI raid card, the faster the transfer rate.

If your striping down a single channel SCSI raid raid, you might be better off with the dual IDE's.

I have a 3 channel AMI UW raid card with 4 7200k rpm drives attached to it. It works beautifully. I haven't benched it yet, but there is a noticeable difference when I upgraded it from my single ATA66 IDE drive to the 4 UW scsi drive raid 0 array.

Where can you find NEW UW SCSI drives at $40/each? What size, brand, and RPM are they?

FunkMan

 

[tcrosson]

A guy on an auctioning site (you know which one) always has the drives on (a couple a week). So I emailed him and asked if he would sell them outright to me. He said he'd go $37 each (the amount his last drives sold at) plus $3 for shipping.

They're 4.5 GB Quantum Atlas II's, 7200RPM, 8ms, I think a 1MB of cache.

He's a pretty nice guy.

 

[loogie]

Can you fit 4+ scsi drives in your case though? Couldn't you also run software raid on the scsi drives if you had a boot drive already?