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Scsi, serial ATA or ATA?

M

MTAX

Member
I'm building a computer for heavy duty video editing. Is it worth it go go scsi? Or should I wait for serial ATA? Or just use my 1000 or so gig of ATA drives that I 've alread got?

Thanks.
 
Since you'll be doing video editing, you'll be working with large files, therefore you need the best sequential transfer rates from your setup.

What always comes into question is money. If you have an unlimited budget, get a large raid 0 array of 15krpm scsi drives. If money is a concern, I don't think it'll be worth it.

But I think your best option would be for a raid 0 array of your current ata drives, even better if you have those nice wd 8mb buffer drives. Serial ATA won't improve your performance, it's just a better interface than the current ata (round cables, less wires, no more slave/master settings, etc).
 
Is there something that makes my current ata drives compatible with serial ata interfaces? Round cables cost quite a bit.
How do you feel about 10k scsi drives? I say a 73 gig for around $300 from the the hot deals forum.
 
Originally posted by: MTAX
Is there something that makes my current ata drives compatible with serial ata interfaces? Round cables cost quite a bit.
How do you feel about 10k scsi drives? I say a 73 gig for around $300 from the the hot deals forum.
Click to expand...

I think there are adapters for SATA that you can use with a controller card. With SATA, you are not going to see SCSI levels on regular 7200RPM drives. With you heavy video editing, I suggest either getting SCSI drives (10,000 - 15,000 RPM) or getting some Western Digital 120gig hard drives with 8-megs of cache. If you raid the 120gig hard drives together, their performance should be about the same as SCSI hard drive.
 
"Is there something that makes my current ata drives compatible with serial ata interfaces? "

Yes you can get adapters. HighPoints 1520 SerialATA card comes with at least one (it's a little unclear on their page and the one pre/review that I've read).

I agree with the others the new WDs with 8MB Cache are fast (and they now have models other then the 120GB), and you can put them on a SATA controller now or later depending on your needs.

Thorin
 
If you are doing video editing, that 8Mb of cache will be saturated almost immediately and you won't see a whole lot of benefit. What you want is (as others have said) the highest sustained transfer rates you can get. I agree with kly1222 on the RAID 0 setup. however, it's really not worth paying the premium for upgrading to 8Mb cache drives unless the ATA drives you have now are slow.

If you do upgrade, I would wait until the new Seagate ATA V drives are released (see Anandtech news page, or the other thread in Gen Hardware) with 60Mb/Platter, these drives should smoke any other ATA drives in STR, and even come very close to 15K SCSI.
 
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