Which SCSI hard drive ?

[Noriaki]

I'm probably looking at 7200RPM maybe 10k if it's not to terribly expensive.

What manufacturer would you recommend?
Quantum Atlas? Seagate Cheetah? IBM Ultrastar? (any other suggestions welcome, those are just the 3 good ones I know of)

I'm probably wanting say 9-13GB...18 would be ok but probably kind of expensive. I don't mind paying the price for the performance, but I have a 17GB EIDE drive for my MP3s so I don't really need 36GB of space on the main drive, and I don't wnat to pay for space I'm not going to use.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: also how much performance improvement will I get over my Western Digital Expert 9 Gig drive? (7200rpm, 2MB buffer, EIDE interface) Will it be good, or am I just wasting my money?

 

[Radboy]

I use IBM Ultrastars exclusively:

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/prod/ultrastar.htm

Get my scsi stuff from Hypermicro:

http://www.hypermicro.com/store/hard_drives.htm

I see they hava 9GB 'Discovery' 36LZX ( ihave 9LZX & 18LZX) for $270 -> 10Krpm, 4.9ms access (nice), 4MB cache.

can get an 18GB version of same drive for $409. Personally, I like that deal the best. I paid ~$500 for my 9LZX when it 1st came out over a year ago. Would love to get 18 gigs at 10Krpm for ~$400.

Cheetahs have been the perrenial faves, they make the only 15Krpm drives (AFAIK)

Lots of ppl have Quantums, cuz they seem to be the fastest 10Krpm drives.

I'd stay w/ IDE if u don't wanna go 10Krpm - that's what makes SCSI drives so juicy & gives u those super-low access times .. which translate into that wonderful responsiveness that 10Krpm LVD drives are known for.

Can't go wrong w/ anything that spins at 10K.

 

[Noriaki]

a 9GB 36LZX ? I thought the 36meant it was 36GB?

what do the numbers mean in IBM hard drives then?

 

[Prodigy^]

@IBM numbers: I actually think it might be referring to the largest size avaliable.....but I'm not sure......it is, however true for the 36LZX and 75GXP series.....

 

[Ulysses]

Check the Storage Review LeaderBoard:
http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/articles/leaderboard.html

 

[judgmentday1]

Do you guys really believe these graphs? http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/printreview.asp?review=u160shootout
It's hard for me to believe that a simple IDE hard drive UDMA/66 or even an ATA100 could be as fast as the ultra160 SCSI hard drives. As you can see in the FrontPage application the IDE is faster than the ultra160 SCSI hard drives, how could that be possible when the ultra160 SCSI bus has more bandwidth, 10k rpm, and better seek times, etc. could be slow than an UDMA/66 that has only 7,200 RPM? I have always thought that the U2W SCSI or better yet the Ultra160 SCSI hard drive makes circles around an IDE hard drive, no matter what application, no matter what operating system. Correct me if I'm wrong. What do you think?

 

[Guardian]

Dude, what the hell!!! The SCSI drives layed the smack down on the IDE drive in each and every test. You need to read that again.

 

[compuwiz1]

Cheetahs are not all 15000 rpm. I have two 9.1 gig and they are 10k. I like em too. Very fast and quiet. They do actually run cool, although the early ones could get warm.

 

[Pete]

Read up on http://storagereview.com, as Ulysses posted. They have a fantastic benchmark comparison tool, where you can see the results of up to like eight HD's together. Very polished site, excellent reviews.

 

[TheyCallMeSAK]

Here we go again!. So many people are fooled by all that HDD "bandwidth" garbage. No HDD can export 66MB of formatted data a second. Let alone 100Mb. Let alone 160MB!!! This number refers to what can be transferred when you have multiple HDDs connected. SCSI is the High Performance alternative to RAID. That's why the SCSI160 interface is great for servers and such. Pay more attention to the SEEK times of the hard drive. Write times also make a difference. Only as an analogy, a SCSI160 drive with same seek times as some IDE drive will not out perform in in running small applications. There probably is no real circumstance like this, but thats the idea. Don't be fooled by the whole ATA/100 interface either. It won't make ANY difference.

 

[TheyCallMeSAK]

About the Frontpage results. They may be wrong. Something could have been backwards, though I doubt it. Frontpage is a joke of a HDD benchmark! SCSI is always better. At least U2 LVD.

 

[Noriaki]

actually...i ignored the ATA66 bar in those graphs....
I don't know what's up with that...everyone knows SCSI stomps IDE.
Until IDE can boast <5ms seek times, that won't change.

and no, no single drive can push 160MB/s.
I plan to have 2 or 3 hard drives, a CDRom, a CDRW and a DVDRom
at least.
I'd be fine with U2W at 80MB/s, but the U160 card is only like $40 more. So I figure if I'm goign to go SCSI I might as well do it right.