SCSI Hard Drive - 68-pin or 80-pin, 10,000 or 15,000 & Windows NT4

[Escalade]

Has SCSI drives suddenly fallen out of favor? I called about 5 local stores and nobody has any in stock!

Anyway... I have an old dual-pentium (700MHz) system that I want to use solely as a place to store some large files. It currently has an 8GB 10,000 RPM SCSI drive and now I want to add a second drive. I see there are now 15,000 RPM drives, so my question is this: Would I see a dramatic benefit going with a 15,000 RPM drive? Also, what is the difference between 80-pin and 68-pin interfaces? And one finial question, will Win-NT4 support 36GB drives as one contiguous drive, or will I need to partition it into 2GB (or whatever the limit is) virtual drives?

TIA

 

[Damascus]

15,000 rpm drives will certainly speed up those random accesses. Depends on how
heavily the drive is going to be loaded. As for the pin counts, I think 80-pin is to
support hot-swapping? Not sure about that one.

 

[Richard98]

If you're just going to use the drive for storage, I wouldn't spend the extra $$ on a 15k drive scsi drive - You could get another 10k drive much cheaper. Personally I use an IDE drive for storage and a SCSI drive for my OS - Hard to tell the difference between the 2 when just copying/downloading files.

If you do get a SCSI drive, you'd probably be happier with one that has the 68 pin connector. If you get one with the 80 pin SCA connector, you'll also have to buy an adapter and those can be tricky to install. Do a search here and you'll see.

 

[Woodie]

68 pin is a fast/wide SCSI chain connector.
80 pin (SCA) includes power along w/ the SCSI chain. Designed for machines w/ back planes, where the drives can be slid in and out for swapping in RAID 5 arrays.

You can get adapters for 68 pin cable + 4-pin power to 80 pin SCA. I've only had occasion to use the OEM SCA drives. The HDs themselves are identical, it's just the connection format.

My $.03..save your money, get a 10K.

--Woodie

 

[Escalade]

<< If you're just going to use the drive for storage, I wouldn't spend the extra $$ on a 15k drive scsi drive - You could get another 10k drive much cheaper. Personally I use an IDE drive for storage and a SCSI drive for my OS - Hard to tell the difference between the 2 when just copying/downloading files.

If you do get a SCSI drive, you'd probably be happier with one that has the 68 pin connector. If you get one with the 80 pin SCA connector, you'll also have to buy an adapter and those can be tricky to install. Do a search here and you'll see. >>


Thanks for the input.

I would go with IDE (since I can get them easily locally!) but that system already has a SCSI card and only one drive installed; I figured all I?d have to do with the new drive is set the SCSI ID, connect the cable and be done with it!

I didn?t feel like cracking the case open to see what pin configuration it had, but I?m going to assume that it?s a 68-pin interface ? sounds like the 80-pins are for server applications (i.e. hot-swappable).

The cost between 10,000 & 15,000 really isn?t an issue; if it?s 50% faster transfer I?d be pleased with that although the network and the IDE drives in my current system might be the bottleneck; I have some large (~800 MB) image files that I just need to get off my primary system. Just incase you?re wondering I?m not using the SCSI drive as a backup(!) I have a 4 GB tape drive for that purpose.

 

[Richard98]

You won't see any increase in speed if you're transferring the files over any type of network connection. The network is the bottleneck.

I backup my laptop to my desktop via a network connection and it's slow as hell; regardless of whether I transfer files to my SCSI drive or my IDE drive. Your money, but if it were me I'd definitely go with a big ide drive for your particular application.