Help with Hard Drives, please

  • Thread starter Thread starter Prizmaxic
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Prizmaxic

The Shizz
I am wondering how much of an advantage SCSI Hard Drives will give over IDE Hard Drives. Also how would two IDE drives in a RAID-0 stack up in that comparison.
 
Very little. Very well (although it's not typically necessary).

Slackmaster 2000
 
scsi drives are alot faster (10000 )
even over 7200 drives
a raid setup will only go as fast as your slowest drive
but a raid setup does improve over standard ide setups

I think anyone would prefer scsi over IDE but its just doo daamn expensive
 
When running Nuendo, I always have my performance meter running. With IDE drives, the disk meter runs around 0-1% except when stopping, FF, or Rewind, or exporting a mixdown.
 
SCSI drives are not a lot faster when working with small numbers of large files. Even the 10K drives aren't putting up better numbers than 7200RPM IDE drives. The price difference when we're talking about a DAW makes SCSI unnecessary.

SCSI is beneficial if you plan on having many drives in one system and don't want to have a bunch of IDE controllers duking it out.

RAID 0 is not really as fast as the slowest drive. In a perfect system with matched drives and a good controller, you can *almost* add the sustained transfer rates of both drives, thereby just about doubling performance. A better rule of thumb in a 2 drive system is to expect 1.5X the performance. Of course if either drive fails you're screwed.

Even RAID isn't typically necessary. 32 tracks of 24bit 96khz audio only requires ~9MB/sec sustained transfer. That's not overly stressing a well-maintained 7200RPM IDE drive.

For price and performance on a DAW, IDE is king. Now if you're running a file server or some mission critical shit, then you should be considering SCSI.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Unless you plan to burn cd's while defragmenting a drive, or want 10+ drives in your pc IDE will do what you want. Do not forget the noise of a couple of 10000 drives with their cooling fan. They drive me crazy sometimes. Also the power used is large: a 36GB U160 uses 12W when idle.

I got SCSI years ago, it has some advantages but the price is the problem. So I cheat! Use very large ide drives with a small scsi-ide bridge. Much cheaper than an equivalent scsi, a bit slower but ideal for having a backup copy of your work and faster than tape. Other problem is that scsi is very easy to work with so now I run into troubles whan I want to use ide.
 
There could be some confusion here regarding RAID Terminoligy...I'll have to get my books out here!!!..

RAID0 is better known as disk mirroring...No performance gains to be had here...It's mainly only used for redundancy...If your drive blows then you have an exact copy of your drive that you can switch to. If anything, you could take a small hit in performance using this as your controller has to write to 2 drives rather than 1.

Performance gains etc are really only found when using RAID5 ( striping with parity, 3 or more disks ) I should stop babling on at this point.I can go into it further if you want.

SCSI drives at the end of the day have a longer lifespan and you can also hook 7 devices in a scsi chain ( 8 if you include the controller)....Better than only 4 with IDE....Mind you, the price hike is significant ( in australia anywayz ).

I'll stop know..Almost beer time!!

Later

Danglez.
 
Danglez said:

RAID0 is better known as disk mirroring...No performance gains to be had here...It's mainly only used for redundancy...If your drive blows then you have an exact copy of your drive that you can switch to. If anything, you could take a small hit in performance using this as your controller has to write to 2 drives rather than 1.

AFAIK RAID0 is striping, RAID1 is Mirroring, but I could be wrong. Striping is faster and you generally get the combined capacity of the two drives, with the possible risk of losing all your data in the event of a disk crash.

RAID0 is the fastest of all RAID configs, but only while writing. Reading could be a bit slower as the controller has to read off individual disks to get the data.

The fastest and best option for audio IMHO is a single fast 15000 rpm SCSI disk for audio. Is plenty fast for audio use and as long as you make regular backups, is a fairly safe and non-complex disk setup.

Sang
 
Havoc said:
Use very large ide drives with a small scsi-ide bridge. Much cheaper than an equivalent scsi, a bit slower but ideal for having a backup copy of your work and faster than tape. Other problem is that scsi is very easy to work with so now I run into troubles whan I want to use ide.

What would a SCSI-IDE bridge be?

Sang
 
flatrockrecordin is right - except for momentary flash of buffers Nuendo hard disk performance meter hardly shows any load on hard disks at all, even when I am playing a 30-tracks mix with a whole bunch of live plugins. That is on two 80GB 7200 rpm Barracudas sitting on the same IDE channel.
No need for SCSI.
 
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