SCSI Gurus:

[TunaBoo]

#1 If I want to go 2 10k drives striped, what do you recomend? For drives I was thinking Atlas, and for card pretty sure I want in the adaptec family but not sure yet on specific one. No future expansion room is needed. Just the 2 or 3 drives in raid.

#2 If I want 3 drives in raid 5, same stuff as for #1, or would you recomend something else?

#2. How bout for just 1 10k SCSI drive. Same stuff still or...?

And I already have links to all the SCSI HOWTO articles, just wondered what you guys thought.

 

[bozo1]

Realized that if you are going to be doing hardware based RAID with SCSI, you need a SCSI Raid controller, not just a regular SCSI adapter. You're talking like $400+ just for the card.

 

[Ben]

I like your choice for the drives. Get the Atlas 10KII's.

If you like Adaptec, stay away from the 2100S. I've lots of complaints about that card being slow, etc. Basically it's a POS. You'll want a 3200S or a 3400S.

Personally, I'm a Mylex fan.

RAID 5 is not necessarily the best choice for performance though it depends upon the controller. I would run RAID 0 for performance, or RAID 0+1 if you need redundancy/performance.

Unfortunately it can get costly to run RAID 0+1 if you need lots of storage which is why RAID 5 is popular.

It all depends what your looking for out of your setup.

 

[bozo1]

Ditto with RAID5 not being what you want for performance. We use pretty much all RAID5 on our servers at work for the data protection aspect and the ability to have huge partitions for my users who don't understand the concept of getting rid of old emails hence the multiple 60+ Gig Exchange databases I have to deal with. (Granted the 128MB Cache on the controller can help offset the performance hit a bit.) You want speed, do RAID0. Want data protection with a slight performance hit, RAID1 - best of both worlds, RAID0+1.

 

[TunaBoo]

Well I was gonna go the raid 5 route for most of the speed of raid 1, but cheaper than raid 10 or 01.



Okay for 2 DSCSI drives in raid 0, I would want a 3200S or a 3400S.


For a single 10k atlasII, what card do I want?

 

[bozo1]

If you don't plan to do hardware Raid, the Adaptec 29160N is a good choice. Tekram has a card for about $120 which is Ultra2 but if you aren't going to hit multiple drives at once, you won't see the difference between an Ultra2 or Ultra160. You can get the OEM flavor of the Adaptec card for about $180 but it may not come with an LVD cable which will set you back about $35-40.

 

[TunaBoo]

<< If you don't plan to do hardware Raid, the Adaptec 29160N is a good choice. Tekram has a card for about $120 which is Ultra2 but if you aren't going to hit multiple drives at once, you won't see the difference between an Ultra2 or Ultra160. You can get the OEM flavor of the Adaptec card for about $180 but it may not come with an LVD cable which will set you back about $35-40. >>



And for all of these I need a $30 active termintor right? Or can last drive do it?

Any idea of the Tekram raid card for 120? I think that would work for 1 atlas2, 40MB is fast and the access would be sweet.

 

[bozo1]

LVD drives (Ultra2, Ultra160) are terminated via the cable. You need an LVD cable which has a terminator at the end of the cable - no termination is done on the drive. Mwave has the Tekram DC-390U2 for $139 (Retail package) which includes the cable but I don't know if that is the best price you can find for it.

If you go this route, you need to make sure to get a standard 68-pin connector on the drive - not the 80-pin SCA connector. The SCA connector is used for hot-swappable drives in servers to plug into a hot-swappable backplane. If you get one of those, you'll have to buy an adapter to use it.

 

[TunaBoo]

dp

 

[TunaBoo]

Yah. I know 80 pins are bad.

When I figure out the 2 or 3 SCSI setups I want to do I will post here. Think Tekram - adaptec will be any preformance or reliability difference?

I am too poor for SCSI, this obviously isn't for me

 

[Apex]

You definitely want to look into ATTO if you plan to do RAID0. The Atto ExpressPCI UL3S (single channel) is enough for 2-3 drives, and it's $270 or so. It's a lot faster than the Mylex ExtremeRAID 2000 ($1300+) and the Adaptec 3400S ($800+), however, it's just for RAID0.

If you need help setting it up, contact me, I've played around with it for quite awhile now.

 

[TunaBoo]

Okay here is what I came up with. Let me know if you know of anything better for the price/performance ratio or whatever. Also, make sure this all works together and I didn't screw up. Thanks a LOT guys.


Single SCSI

TEKRAM DC-390U2W PCI ULTRA 2 SCSI HOST ADAPTER (Retail)

Quantum Atlas 10K II &quot;Typhoon&quot;, 18.4 GB , Ultra160 Wide LVD SCSI-3, 10,000 RPM, 4.7 ms seek, 8 MB cache, A/V Rated, 3.5&quot; LP, 68 pin interface, 5-year warranty.


SCSI Raid 0
Atto ExpressPCI UL3S

3 x Quantum Atlas 10K II &quot;Typhoon&quot;, 18.4 GB , Ultra160 Wide LVD SCSI-3, 10,000 RPM, 4.7 ms seek, 8 MB cache, A/V Rated, 3.5&quot; LP, 68 pin interface, 5-year warranty.

 

[bozo1]

Looks good to me!

 

[Hanpan]

If you are doing just a single drive i would look at the new cheetah x15-36lp drive. It is a second generation 15000 rpm drive from seagate and should be available soon.

 

[Pariah]

I would definitely recommend against SCSI RAID for a home system. There's no reason for it, unless you want to tell all your friends you paid an exhorbitant amount of money for your storage setup. There is no performance to be gained from running SCSI RAID over a couple of seperate SCSI drives for 99% of what people use their computers for at home.

If you have the money to buy a SCSI RAID card, it would make much more sense to buy a cheaper nonRAID SCSI card and then use the saved money on a couple of faster 15K drives which will perform better on typical tasks. The next generation X15 is just starting to hit shelves in Japan, and should be here soon, that is the drive to wait for, as it's STR is expected to be close to that of current 10K's (except the Cheetah 73LP) drive in a stripe.

If you are dead set on RAID, avoid Adaptec like the plague, they make the worst cards in the industry. They don't even use their own cards for their enterprise level products.

 

[TunaBoo]

<< I would definitely recommend against SCSI RAID for a home system. There's no reason for it, unless you want to tell all your friends you paid an exhorbitant amount of money for your storage setup. There is no performance to be gained from running SCSI RAID over a couple of seperate SCSI drives for 99% of what people use their computers for at home.

If you have the money to buy a SCSI RAID card, it would make much more sense to buy a cheaper nonRAID SCSI card and then use the saved money on a couple of faster 15K drives which will perform better on typical tasks. The next generation X15 is just starting to hit shelves in Japan, and should be here soon, that is the drive to wait for, as it's STR is expected to be close to that of current 10K's (except the Cheetah 73LP) drive in a stripe.

If you are dead set on RAID, avoid Adaptec like the plague, they make the worst cards in the industry. They don't even use their own cards for their enterprise level products. >>



Okay thank you for the insightfull post. However as I said before, this is not for me. Look at the site in my sig. The SCSI raid is for the top of the line video editor in my store. I also have an IDE raid and a single IDE drive for that. It is for someone willing to spend a fewK on a computer that will kick butt at video editing. A single drive will NOT be as good at video editing as a 3 drive raid0 array.

For everyone else - the stuff will all work together? I got my LVD's and SCSI 160s straight?

 

[Apex]

Sounds about right. Those are good drive choices too. You definitely want an AV rated drive, and you want to set the Stripe size to 64kb. I have 3 Seagate Cheetah X15's in a RAID on the UL3S at 32kb:

3 Seagate Cheetah X15's in RAID0

Though the transfer rates are nearly saturating the PCI bus (100+ mb/sec) and the 3.9ms seek times are good, the 4mb cache isn't large enough for your purposes.

BTW, over 80% of movies produced in Hollywood are assisted by ATTO ExpressPCI adaptors.

 

[Flat]

I would recommend Seagate drives, I have had only good experience with their SCSI and IDE drives