IDE or SCSI don't forget RAID

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Fusion2

New member
i just can't believe the huge difference in speed these articals show, humm, more spew form corp "we're getting our butts wipped by cheap IDE" so lets lie and make our failing bottom line fatter...

to be safe under RAID they say use the 5 drive RAID, for that money SCSI may be better/safer and a little cheaper...

http://hardware.devchannel.org/hardwarechannel/03/10/20/1953249.shtml?tid=20&tid=38&tid=49

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/10/20/2212244.shtml?tid=137&tid=198

anyone up to date on this topic lately?
 
That was an interesting comparison, but as many submitters pointed out, he wasn't comparing apples with apples. Just because the scsi drive was on an old p3 and the ide was on a 2.2 GHz P4, doesn't make the result any more credible.

I remember we had an old IBM PS2 server at work, a 66Mhz 486 with IBM's MCA bus. It used to read and write the pants off the flash new Pentium 133s beacuse it was designed to be a server, not a deskop machine
 
After reading the article: Opening 50.000 files... As you can see the access time of the scsi drive is clearly lower than that of the IDE drive. That doesn't matter much handling a handful of big files (like DAWs do) but it does when you have to access a LOT of small files, like the author does. Physical differences between drives like that can't be accounted to the difference in interface. It's just a different drive.

So he may be right up to a point, but he doesn't show to be very knowledgeable in the matter.

SCSI still has an advantage over IDE in the server market where for instance often a lot of users try to access the same disk at the same time but features like tagged command queuing (a feature that probably has contributed to the differences in performance that the author is showing us) will be widespread in the IDE domain soon so that gap will close even further.

The biggest advantage of RAID 5 is that you get redundancy with the least amount of lost hard disk space.
With hot swappable drives, you can remove a failing drive while the system is up, insert a new drive and the system will automatically rebuild the drive from the information stored on the other drives. Very cool.

But it's not really something for us mortal homerecordists to consider.
Where are we going to hide that noisy stack of five, six heavily aircooled, humming and rattling hard drives?
And the need for near 100% uptime is not an issue for us too.
If you really want redundancy in your DAW, get 2 identical IDE drives and put them in a RAID 1 setup (mirroring). Don't forget to make backups regularly though. Even RAID 5 servers are back-upped regularly (A failure or other hardware can still instantly turn your RAID 5 stack into a smoking pile of crap).

All I have to say is this: If you want to get a DAW with great performance for a good price, just go for IDE.

Just my two cents (but remember: the € is $1.16 nowadays).
 
Heck, the WD Raptors are coming down in price. Just buy 2 or 3 of those babies on a Raid 0 config and your smokin!
 
I run a cluster of 5 Linux machines with many cross-mounted SCSI drives, who are synced by RAID5. The setup is absolutly awesome, but as soon as one machine has to be re-booted, it can take up to 1/2 hr until all hd's are in sync again.
 
Giganova said:
I run a cluster of 5 Linux machines with many cross-mounted SCSI drives, who are synced by RAID5. The setup is absolutly awesome, but as soon as one machine has to be re-booted, it can take up to 1/2 hr until all hd's are in sync again.
Click to expand...

what is the system primarily used for, thanks, if audio is in the list what software, thanks again...

wow half an hour to sync, i guess that's normal? donno, sounds slow, but i'm not up on current RAID 5 config...
 
its not used for audio. During the 1/2 hr syncing period, you can already work, but the system is slooooooooow.
 
Mons said:
Heck, the WD Raptors are coming down in price. Just buy 2 or 3 of those babies on a Raid 0 config and your smokin!
Click to expand...

LOL, I had 3 HD's running raid 0 using the third for backup's. I got on this forum and started to tell everyone how great my setup was working, doh! ...I was doing some video editing, about 8.5 hours worth, didn't put in on my backup, and lost the raid controller (controller was on the motherboard). I had to backup the HD I was using for backups, I formatted that HD and now use it without raid 0 for the main HD. I miss my raid 0 :( The data's still on the two hard drives, I just need to get off my ass and set up raid 0 somewhere to get the data off.

ALWAYS REMEMBER TO BACKUP STUFF :P
 
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