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These old SCSI drives faster, or slower than this new IDE drive?

T

Trevelyan

Diamond Member
Okay, I'm trying to determine if it would be worth it to try to salvage this old video editing system's SCSI setup, or if I should just switch it over to one IDE drive.

SCSI Setup:

Adaptec Ultra Wide Controller (AHA-2940UW)

- Drive: Fujitsu 9.1GB Ultra Wide (2 of these)
7200RPM, 7.5MS seek, 512K buffer

- Drive: IBM 9.1GB Ultra-1 (3 of these)
7200RPM, 7.5MS seek, 512K buffer

- Drive: Quantum 4.55GB Ultra SCSI-3 (1 of these)
7200RPM, 8MS seek,

IDE Setup:

- Drive: Western Digital 200GB ATA/100
7200RPM, 8MS seek, 2MB buffer


So what is the consensus? Should I try to salvage the SCSI setup, or is there no real speed difference at this point? What about if I went with a 8MB buffer IDE drive?

Thanks for the help in advance!
 
Your SCSI card is only capable of 40MBps. Your Western Digital is capable of 100MBps, but that spec only applies to data transfers from the buffer. Sustained data transfers on the fastese IDE drives aren't really any faster that the SCSI at 40MBps. And the SCSI drives don't hit the processors they way IDE drives do, so depending on what you are doing, the SCSIs might be well worth the effort.
 
Its gonna be for video editing. The system they would be set up on will be a dual processor 1.0ghz PIII with 512MB PC100 ram.

EDIT: Also, the OS will be WIN NT 4.0
 
Sounds like you will be doing big data transfers, which is where SCSI really shines. That kind of activity would bog down the processor when using IDE. Video editing is very demanding on processor and RAM, and since yours aren't bleeding edge (can use all the help they can get) you will be much better of with SCSI on that box.
 
Allow me to provide some dissent.

If you were going to use an OS that could make better use of UDMA (Windows 2000/XP),
then the difference in processor usage between the two setups would be negligible.

Also, the IDE drive does have a speed advantage over a single one of your SCSI drives, simply
because it is much newer technology wise. Plus the overall capacity (4 times your SCSI setup)
is very tempting for storing large amounts of data.

Where the SCSI setup has an advantage is being able to balance the tasks you are doing among
several drives. Where the more advanced features of the SCSI bus can come into play.



If the choice was between the older SCSI setup, and more than one modern IDE drive; I'd give
it to the IDE. With the choices you have given. I'd ask if it is possible to set up part of the
SCSI as the working drives, and add the IDE as data storage for the raw and finished videos.
 
Originally posted by: CQuinn
Allow me to provide some dissent.

If you were going to use an OS that could make better use of UDMA (Windows 2000/XP),
then the difference in processor usage between the two setups would be negligible.

Also, the IDE drive does have a speed advantage over a single one of your SCSI drives, simply
because it is much newer technology wise. Plus the overall capacity (4 times your SCSI setup)
is very tempting for storing large amounts of data.

Where the SCSI setup has an advantage is being able to balance the tasks you are doing among
several drives. Where the more advanced features of the SCSI bus can come into play.



If the choice was between the older SCSI setup, and more than one modern IDE drive; I'd give
it to the IDE. With the choices you have given. I'd ask if it is possible to set up part of the
SCSI as the working drives, and add the IDE as data storage for the raw and finished videos.
Click to expand...

The only problem is that the video editing software is for Win NT only...

So what would you recommend in this case?
 
What about picking up something newer? You can get a modern 36GB 10k Ultra320 SCSI drive and a dual-channel Ultra320 card (NT 4.0 compatible) for about $260 at Newegg, if you want to stay within the NT realm. Additional drives are about $130-ish.

Bigger picture: maybe another 512MB of RAM would be a worthwhile investment too. Sorry if I'm totally running the wrong direction with your budget here 😀

To add my own experience, I had an old Quantum Atlas 10k (first-gen) drive that would certainly be faster and quicker than your UW drives, and it's about 10% faster in an I/O-intensive task than a WD 800JB Special Edition drive under Win2000SP4. Just a data point to help sort stuff. By contrast, a Cheetah 15k.3 was over 250% faster, so that shows what several generations of SCSI development have done for disk performance. If 18GB would suit your purposes, the 68-pin Cheetah 15k.3 18GB drives are down to $145 at Hypermicro, by the way. 5-year warranty, brand-new.
 
Those drives are so ancient, that any SCSI advantage will be moot. The trasfer rate of those old drives is on the order of ~11MB/s. That's a fifth of what the IDE drive can do. And even the seek rates aren't anything to speak of on such an old drive.

Concerning the processor usage: it won't matter since this is just a single user enviromnent where lag doesn't matter.
 
No question, go with the IDE. Not only would the SCSI drives be a lot slower, but none of them are big enough to store even an hour's worth of DV footage which makes them pretty useless for even moderate video editing.
 
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