computer guts

  • Thread starter Thread starter dobro
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Slackmaster
I understand all you say for the most part and you are right. The speed and accessability of the new IDE drives do rival the scsi at far less. And I have to believe that processor speed and amount of memory really will in the end bog down like you said. This has really helped me as much as dobro hopefully!!! As far as my machine I do have 2 68 pin scsi, 1 50 pin scsi and 2 ide.
 
Of course I was talking about a "perfect" situation. The SCSI bus will more efficiently handle data transfers than IDE so you will see benefits in real life applications. It just depends on WHAT you need versus WHAT you need. If you catch my drift :)

I'm very happy that 20GB 7200RPM drives can be had for $150. Almost makes disk space problems obsolete. Compared to 10GB SCSI drives at $300...yipes!

Slackmaster 2000
 
Someone correct me if im wrong. Ive only worked with dos to win 95 but I thought you had to put a cd rom driver on before you could even access a cd rom. I know you can boot from a cd rom but the os system is already installed. which would mean you have
to have a floppy disk in the first place. Am I wrong in assuming this or am I behind the times. Someone please let me know.
Dobro: I have seen USB cases where you can
take your ide/atapi devices (harddrive,cdrom,etc)and go through usb. Im
not familiar with usb but slackmaster might
know if this is possible.

Duckhead
 
Yea you still have to use the ole floppy to set the cd-rom up in a new system as far as I can tell. From what I've read anyway that boots up first and sets it up in the hard drive for the rest of the programming. Hopefully I'm right at least I will know for sure when I get my first one built. If it doesn't work I'll have an expensive boat anchor!!!
 
Just a question that's verging on the silly range, and which will probably evolve into further questions as I write...

What happens if you're playing eight tracks 24/96 from the sound card through a mixer and record eight as well? I assume that this situation will rarely occur in a home recording studio but just for the sake of the exercise. According to the theoretic situation that Slackmaster set up, this would still allow for 57 tracks out and 57 tracks in but what would the real numbers be? I presume that at least eight out and two in isn't an impossible real-life situation.

Slackmaster, do you have some sort of tool for measuring transfer on your machine? I would really like to see what the figures turn out to be when one is reading and writing to a IDE disk. I'm not trying to argue against IDE disk, I would be as happy as the next guy if I could use IDE disks instead of SCSI. Have you measured a sustained transfer rate of 33MB/s? I thought it sounded high but maybe IDE disks have caught up more than I thought.

Also, I guess that the 33MB/s assumes a disk without fragmentation, only reading _or_ writing etc. My SCSI disk can transfer something like 80MB/s in a perfect world but when I hook up the measuring tool (works on SCSI only) and run the worst test case (read and write to a fragmented disk), it drops to below 10MB/s. Which would give me (10000/288/2) 17 tracks in and 17 out. Still plenty but that's with a top of the line SCSI. I'll check what the actual number drops to when running the worst case, I think it's pretty much below 10MB/s.

Finally, wouldn't the IDE's longer access time (9ms compared to SCSI 4,9 ms) mess things up? Especially if you're reading and writing at the same time.

Any hardware wiz care to clarify?

Thanks

/Ola, who someday will learn to write shorter posts...
 
ola,

You're right...what I posted was 100% hypothetical and things don't really work that way. There's a lot more involved and a drive will never consistantly transfer at its maximum throughput rate. That's why I said that I was talking about a "perfect" situtation. (BTW, I was also wrong to say "will sustain transfer rates..." since that implied that UDMA/33 drives can put out 33MB/sec consistantly which is not true. In fact no drive today will put out at the maximum rated transfer rate)

But anyway, ATA/33/66 do provide great performance until you get into heavy loaded (many task many device) situation. I would never buy an IDE drive for my server...I stick with SCSI.

For most PC applications, and in my opinion recording, EIDE drives are fine...especially on the budget that 90% of us are on.

Check this older link which shows two internally identical Quantum drives...one SCSI Ultra (20MB/sec) and one UDMA/33 (33MB/sec). The ATA drive beats the SCSI in all benchmarks.

'course that's old technology. Today most SCSI devices are Ultra2 and capable of 80MB/sec....however, ATA/66 is promising. I'm sure that if you do some searching you'll find decent comparisons of the two.

Yes, SCSI is a better performer than IDE. Yes SCSI devices tend to be more reliable (which has NOTHING to do with IDE itself, but low quality manufacturing). But that is NOT a reason to prefer SCSI...especially when it comes to cost. With my old regular IDE drives...my system used to thrash like crazy while recording. With my ATA/66 drive I have yet to say..."man I need a new hard drive". When I upgrade to a PIII I might, but on my Celeron 500 I'm running into CPU problems before HD problems. (BTW, SCSI does not offer lower CPU utilization than EIDE as many would claim).

Here's a link to a very fair article on prorec.com about disk drives and performance: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/9DC930FCE2658C6F862565ED0078AEF1

Here's another: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/CBDB27C9A605B9F2862566880018C085

Slackmaster 2000
 
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