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SCSI owners speak up/Encoding advice

HendrixFan

HendrixFan

Diamond Member
Ive been using the same rig for far too long. I just got a nice raise and Im looking at upgrading. Ive pretty much got everything figured out other than the hard drives. Ill be using this machine for editting and gaming, with editting getting the first nod. I edit video and audio for fun, lotsa encoding.

So far, Im set on getting an AMD X2 with 2 GBs of RAM. I want hard drive performance to go along with the RAM and CPU. Now, Im not sure if I want to go with the SATA Seagate 7200 drives in RAID, or a SCSI setup.

I know throughput on the SATA drives is pretty good, but what about the seek time? I know that SCSI kicks SATA all over the place with seek time, and I hear CPU usage is extremely minimal.

For encoding, is SCSI going to be a huge boost over SATA? I know Ill be paying more, but will I see the difference, or will it be small?
 
SCSI is great. It rocks. Great for RAID, easy cableing, good seek time, great bandwith. But it's expensive as f*ck. So, if your dripping money, it's a good choice. But only get it if the price difference between it and SATA doesn't really matter to you.
 
Originally posted by: Tick
SCSI is great. It rocks. Great for RAID, easy cableing, good seek time, great bandwith. But it's expensive as f*ck. So, if your dripping money, it's a good choice. But only get it if the price difference between it and SATA doesn't really matter to you.
Click to expand...

Well, Im kinda going more high dollar than I usually do for an upgrade. I know cheap and SCSI dont belong together. However, I dont want to pay alot for something that doesnt make that much of a difference.

For example, Im pretty sure I can get a hardware RAID card to run 3 or 4 SATA drives for the price of 1 or 2 SCSI's in RAID. The SATA drives will have good throughput in such large numbers, possibly within range of SCSI. However, RAID will do nothing for the seek times.

Im guessing that when I encode it will be CPU bound (unless I use HuffYUV), so will seek time come into play, or will bandwidth still be the cheif concern.

As I see it, to get great speed out of a SATA RAID setup, Id need more than two drives. SATA drives are so big (and cheap) these days that 4 of them would be 1TB of storage. Thats nice and all, but I still have over 100GB free on my 360GB setup. Its a bit overkill.

On the flip side, unless I shell out for the huge $600 SCSI drives, the SCSI RAID setup I go with may leave me short on space.

Im sure SCSI is faster, but how much faster are we talking for encoding purposes?
 
For encoding, having enough ram is the most important charectoristic. Seek time can be important, but it wont make a huge difference. Bandwidth can also be important, but again, not a huge diff. The biggest difference for a desktop system, especially gfx workstation, between sCSI and SATA, is if you intend to use RAID. If you really need speed, SCSI RAID 10 or 50 can be fast-as-hell. Stand alone, the drives will be fairly comperable. If you do intend to set up a large array, you might want to consider a mobo with PCI-X. The extra bandwith can help a bunch. However, that means a server board, and expensive ECC ram. A budget might tell us more. Also, it depends on how seriously your going to get into encoding. If you just want a hobby, I'd say stick with SATA.
 
The biggest advantage of SCSI (imho) is relability. SCSI has higher MTBF, throughput on the controller, and good RAID support. I would go either Raid 5 + Hotspare, large ATA (serial or parallel) for longer term storage) and backup device (tape drive) or SATA 0+1 4 drives, with maybe the large long term storage drive (so you don't have to worry about size as much as speed). Either way, I would still say get a backup device, such as a tape drive. I'ts so nice to just change a tape every other week and know that I am backed up all the time.
 
I know that SATA runs at 150MB/s while you can get Ultra320 SCSI which runs at 320MB/s assuming you have a 64bit PCI bus to run it on.

I really think that investing in SCSI would be a waste (I own an Ultra160 SCSI card & Seagate X15 HDD) The access time is nice (3.6m) however I have heard several people do video & audio editing & encoding on 2x WD 80GB IDE HDDs in a striped array.

I don't think you'll have to worry too much about bandwidth since most HDDs peak around 60-70MB/s. You can check out this site for HDD reviews they really go out of their way to measure performance.

http://www.storagereview.com/

I believe your encoding will be limited more so by the processors speed (which would be a pretty fast processor to begin with).

It all comes down to how long it takes to encode the video and I'm pretty sure you will not see a difference between SATA & SCSI except how much you pay.

I would invest the difference if you really want to off the amount of money you would spend on SCSI.
 
He's not running a server. Tape drives are expensive, and a RAID array with fault tollerence is plenty. Also, tapes are expensive, and you have to store them. Do not get PATA. There is no reason to at this point. You'll kick yourself later, especially since you can afford it. And whatever you do, do not go with straight RAID 0.
 
SCSI will give you about a 0% speed increase for encoding. RAID will give you an equal speed increase. You will need one hell of a server farm with an appropriate encoder to utilize all the CPU's to have enough power to make the streaming capabilities of even a single SATA drive a bottleneck, let alone a current 15k SCSI drive or any RAID 0 array. About the only factors that will have a major impact on encoding times are the speed of your CPU, the codec you use, and the encoder you use. Hard drive STR, hard drive access time, amount of memory, blah blah blah... all will have no measurable impact.
 
Here's a recent thread, some of the users compare sata & scsi.. check the sustained throughput..
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1649102&enterthread=y

Notice the Original poster is getting 192.6MB sustained on 4 raptors in a raid 0 config.

One thing to consider is any raid card or onboard raid that is on the pci bus is limitted to 133MB/s..

This is where for example the NF4's 4 sata ports have an advantage over any pci based controller...

You'd have to get a 64bit pci-x sata/scsi to overcome the 32bit pci bus limit...

So a compromise might be getting a 15K scsi drive for your OS & programs and using the onboard NF4 sata ports for a source & destination working drives...

ie. C: & D: (OS & Progs) would be a 74 gig 15k w/ a $40 scsi 32bit controller
E (source) would be 2 - sata drives in raid 0 off the NF4 sata controllers
F (destination) would be 2 sata drives in raid 0 off the NF4 sata controller...

And you could still use a lare 250-300g pata or if your mobo has a 2nd set of sata port. as your backup drive...

Regards,
Jose
 
Originally posted by: forcesho
Originally posted by: Kensai
15K SCSI are only for those with alot of extra money. Stick with SATA, it's more cost effective.
Click to expand...

Being a huge scsi user, I agree with Kensai.. unless you got money to burn..

my un updated system.. 10 scsi drives.. I maxed it out with 12 on my lian li v2000
ie http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/forcesho/v2000b.jpg
Click to expand...

Nice :thumbsup:😀

Those some Fujitsus I spy on the right?
 
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