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SCSI help

D

dowxp

Diamond Member
I currently run on IDE drives. Im thinking about upgrading to SCSI. What is the best SCSI controller card? If i were to upgrade, whats the best value HD (10gb+) thats SCSI? cdrw & cdrom will be plextor.


Is it worth it to upgrade. i understand it speeds up the comp, and you can burn while playing quake or some cpu intensive game.

thanks.
 
Well, the BEST SCSI card will set you back a ton, but I'm a big fan of the Adaptec 29160...it will be more than adequate (and quite fast) for anything you want to do, unless you're looking at RAID, which you're not.

As for drives, you may want to consider two drives, a smaller, faster boot drive (4-8 GB), and then a slower, higher capacity drive for just data (8-16GB).

The Quantum Atlas drives are great, the Atlas V or the Atlas 10K (or 10K II or 10K III).

A little slower but also a little cheaper is the IBM 18ES DNES drive, which is a 7200RPM drive (as is the Atlas V).

The atlas drives have the advantage of being LVD 160, as opposed to LVD 80.
 
Adaptec is the best SCSI controller card. No question about it.

For 10 GB Hard drive, I would say Western Digital H.D.is the cheapest. I might be wrong.

Personally, I like IBM ULTRASTAR 36LZX 9.1 GB if you are looking for sub 10 GB.

Good luck

 
Might wana check at Storagereview forum. Those guys seem to think the new Adaptec cards are more problematic than the the Tekrams. I have the Tekram DC390-U2W, which sppts U2W protocol, up to 80MB/s. Considering that the fastest drive on the planet cannot sustain even 50MB/s, you seem to lose nothing by going with a U2W card.

Can get the Tekram card for $89 here (free shipping). Hard to beat that price.

The card comes with all the cables & terminators you'll ever need, which can get expensive if purchased separately.

I've run the card in/with the following OS'es:

W98
W98/SE
WinME
W2K
Whistler Pro beta1
Caldera 2.4 (Linux)
Mandrake 7 (Linux)
BeOS (FreeBe)
 
Adaptec are great, but I haven't tried their 160s yet. Except for my dells which came with u160 controllers w/Raid 5.

I stopped my at 2940U2W which is more than enough.

Adaptec are expensive. Tekram is the alternative, I had some tekram and had NO problem. In my view, they're almost the same. Tekram is a lot cheaper but still.. I got adaptecs.
 
Like Radboy says...

I, myself, don't trust Adaptec, nor I like its over priced chip set on its controller card.

I would go w/ Tekram 390U3 series w/ LSI Chip. (I am using 390U3W w/ WD enterprise)
390U3W also using Dual channel controller that can auto negociate 160 LVD apart from regular UW which may slow you down when you have them in same channel.
 
I've had an Adaptec 2940, 2940U2W, and 29160, which have all been excellent cards, and I would highly recommend any of them. (Particularly the U2W or 160). I'm in the process of upgrading to an Adaptec RAID 3200S, since I haven't plugged it in yet, I don't know how well it performs, but I'm optimistic because of my past experiences. In the 9-18 GB range, The Quantum Atlas 10k II and the Seagate Cheetah X15 would be the fastest available hard drives, for a cheap drive, you'd be looking at something with a slower spindle speed like the IBM Ultrastar 9ES or 18ES. You can also find pretty good deals on Ultrastar 18LZX (10k) and Cheetah 18 drives. You should probably get a 10k drive for booting (9-18 gig) and if you need more space, but don't need the extra performance, go with a 7200 rpm drive for data (they go up to 180 gigs right now, although that drive is hardly cheap).

The upgrade to SCSI is definately worth it, if you can afford it. I'm hesitant to try burning a CD while I play Quake, or a similar game, but I've done other things, such as encode mpeg files, and other similar CPU intensive activities while burning CDs, and only rarely get bad CDs (99% of the time that is due to configuration issues)
 
How does raid work? im a newbie when it comes to raid because not alot of people have it.

my budget i wouldlike to keep <300. but is it worth the upgrade? whats the difference between all those types of SCSI? theres ultra wide, 3 ,2 and all that. besides speed transsfer difference and price, is there anythign else?

Would a home consumer be interested in it? or is it mainly for servers that need fast access?

thanks all.
 
all depends on how much of a hardware junkee you become- I am running 2 Ibm 36lzx 18 gig'ers on an Adaptec 39160 U160 card and it smokes. Win 2k loads fast, saving TIFF files in Photoshop is really fast. How much speed can you afford 🙂
 
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