SCSI Questions

[Stiganator]

I am looking to jump into a little bit of SCSI, I am thinking Ultra 320 is a bit too expensive espesially since it would double the PCI bus. So I am thinking Ultra 160? but do I want fast, wide, narrow or what ever? Then there is like 80, 68, 50 pin, LVD and other junk? I want to hook up a couple cheap 9 or 18 GB drives from hypermicro, and maybe an optical drive if they perform better on SCSI. This would be on a P4C800-E if it makes a difference.

 

[mechBgon]

If you get a 68-pin Ultra160 or Ultra320 drive, an LVD cable and terminator, and an Ultra160 or Ultra320 controller, you're on the way to a pretty simple installation. It's not much different from using an IDE drive on a plug-in PCI-slot IDE controller.

The setup I'd start with is the LSI Logic U160 card/cable/terminator kit from Hypermicro and at least a current-model 68-pin 10000rpm drive like a Maxtor Atlas 10k IV or Seagate Cheetah 10k.6. The older drives still have some of SCSI's ace cards like command queueing and quick seek times, but the newer ones also have the high transfer rates that you would probably be expecting, and they'll usually be carrying 5-year warranties too. If you're not ready to lay out that kind of money, there's no harm in starting with an old slowpoke drive, but don't expect the impossible of it.

The ultimate, at the moment, is probably Fujitsu's MASxxxxNP units, which start at under $170 at Newegg (if you trust them to pack a HDD right, which they seldom seem to be capable of ). These are fluid-bearing 15000rpm drives with sub-4ms seek times and transfer rates that start at almost 80MB/sec and bottom out around 60MB/sec... nice! :Q

An Ultra320 drive will automatically fall back to the Ultra160 protocol if that's what the controller supports (or if that's what the user stipulates in the card's BIOS). If all the drives and the controller are U320, it will be way faster than the PCI bus, yeah... but they can talk to eachother at full U320 speed on the SCSI bus. Ah so! :light: So don't rule out a U320 drive on the basis of what your PCI bus supports.

On a P4C800-E Deluxe, the best PCI slot for the card is... lessee here... either PCI slot #1 or #5. They share an IRQ only with eachother, so use #1 and leave #5 empty, or vice versa. Have fun

 

[Zepper]

Stay with IDE for your optical. There are hardly any true SCSI optical drives out there any more and cost way too much. So by far the best deal is that LSI U160 host adapter (never "controller" when you're talkin' SCSI!). And when you're talkin' U160 HDs, there is only wide LVD which can be either 80-pin SCA or normal 68-pin. Some say you can get away with using all SCA, but I still feel you should have at least one normal drive in each cable segment. SCA has to be adapted to 68-pin to hook to normal cable so be sure to get LVD rated adapters (some hypermicro SCA drives come with adapters). Get free ground shipping from hypermicro by mentioning StorageReview.com. And sometimes you can get a free HA in combo deals from them - check for their latest offer over on www.storagereview.com .
. SCSI parts, drives, etc. vendors:
hypermicro.com
centrix-intl.com
pc-pitstop.com
scsi4me.com
and I've gotten lots of good SCSI stuff cheap off eBay.

Good SCSI info and links - http://www.scsifaq.org

.bh.