SCSI performance question

[TorinoGT24]

I have seen a few posts of people wondering what to expect from their scsi setup. Well, here's mine. I haven't got it installed yet, since peices are arriving separately in the mail. Anyway...

Seagate cheetah 10k rpm 4mb buffer 9.2gb drive.
Adaptec 2940u2w
80 to 68 pin adapter

Dont know if it matters, but the mobo is an ECS L4VXA2 with a celeron 2.2 running at 2.91. 512mb ddr pc2100 also.

Really, all I want to know is will this be faster than my regular ide ata100 drive? Any help is appreciated. Thanks guys!

-Collin-

 

[mechBgon]

That's a pretty old drive and its sustained-transfer rates aren't going to be too high compared to recent ATA drives. For example, my first-generation 9GB Quantum Atlas 10k maxes around 25MB/second, while recent ATA drives will exceed 50MB/sec and recent SCSI drives will exceed 70MB/sec. Your SCSI drive does retain command queueing and low seek times in its favor, so it might feel 'quick' regardless of its limited STR.

If you like it and want to go for something faster, grab an LSI Logic U160 card, a U320 cable, a U320 terminator and a Maxtor Atlas 10k IV, which is probably the fastest all-around 10k SCSI drive for the moment. If you're ok with an 18GB drive, then a Fujitsu MAS-series 15k drive would be even faster.

I hope your PCI bus speed is close to spec, since SCSI cards aren't always tolerant of out-of-spec PCI. Have fun with your new toys!

 

[TorinoGT24]

hmmm, so I take it the 80mb/sec transfer rate is not a sustained rating? I might upgrade to a 15k ultrastar drive later, but that would need a new card as well. I got into this scsi drive because I got it all for about 50 bucks. One thing scsi systems aren't is cheap.....so I'm in a bit of a pickle here.

-Collin-

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: TorinoGT24
hmmm, so I take it the 80mb/sec transfer rate is not a sustained rating? I might upgrade to a 15k ultrastar drive later, but that would need a new card as well. I got into this scsi drive because I got it all for about 50 bucks. One thing scsi systems aren't is cheap.....so I'm in a bit of a pickle here.

Not even the latest 15K drives can sustain 80MB/sec at minumum speed.

FYI, 15K Deskstars are probably the cheapest 15K drive. They are decent for the price, certainly beating any IDE drive out there, but not the best. It wouldnt really be a hassle putting them on a 2940U2W controller, because its not going to sustain 80MB/sec anyways, the only thing that will suffer is your burst speed.