my scsi situation???

  • Thread starter Thread starter amrcel
  • Start date Start date

For $330 dollars more is a 35gb scsi 5.2 seek better than a 75gb ide 8.6seek??

  • yes

    Votes: 1 33.3%

  • no

    Votes: 2 66.7%
  • Total voters
    3
  • Poll closed .
A

amrcel

New member
Ok so I am pricing a computer....

the harddrive choices i have are

75gb ide 8.4 seek time

or

36 gb scsi with scsi card 5.3 seek time


to go with the much faster and less harddrive space scsi harddrive is $330 more.....

is the scsi harddrive worth that $330????
 
If you are building a server with thousands of small access requests, go SCSI. If not, go IDE. All benchmarks I've ever seen says that for a DAW, you won't gain from using SCSI. You'll have plenty of use for the extra space though.
 
Ola is right. For a DAW, the IDE drive will give you just as good performance as the SCSI drive.
 
It entirely depends on the SCSI technology you're going with. I upgraded from ATA-66 7200RPM IDE to Ultra160 SCSI with a 15,000RPM Seagate Cheetah drive for audio, and it benchmarks *significantly* higher than the IDE drive. The other guys are right in that the access time is less important for DAW as long as you keep your drive defragmented, but for myself I benefit from the throughput and speed of the SCSI drive.

The hard drive is a classic bottleneck, if you're playing back a lot of stereo tracks while recording simultaneously, then the better your drive is the better off you'll be. You need to look at your situation though, how you'll be recording. You very well may not need the extra performance and can sink the $330 into more RAM. With RAM prices the way they are I wouldn't even consider building a new computer for DAW with less than 512MB (I run 768MB in mine). By the time I'm done with a song I often have 20-30 stereo audio tracks that I'm muting/unmuting and A/B'ing tracks on the fly (40-60 mono tracks), plus another 8-10 MIDI tracks. Dense arrangements can really choke a slower drive. Of course by the time I'm done I have it whittled down to a single stereo track, but that's beside the point.

--Will--
 
I'm curious WWillis- what did you pay for your hard drive + SCSI card?
 
The 18.4GB Seagate Cheetah X15 drive was $375 and the Adaptec 29160N SCSI card was $275. So, $650 for the pair. A good chunk of change considering you can get a Promise ATA100 controller and a 15GB Maxtor ATA100 IDE drive for less than $200 for the pair, but I still considered it worthwhile for me to do. I have a couple of other SCSI devices as well, for example my Epson Perfection 1600SU scanner has both USB and SCSI connections, and it is amazing how much faster it is hooked up to SCSI rather than USB (as I had it previously). I do a lot of photograph scanning, so that was another consideration that leaned me towards the SCSI solution.

<--Will-->
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top