Puzzled about types af hard drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter NotSoBlah
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NotSoBlah

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I am have trouble deciding which would be a better choice, SCSI or UDMA. This drive will be dedicated to recording audio and im looking at 7200RPM around 40 gig. Does UDMA perform better? I dont know, im looking for other opinions.
Thanks,

Matt
 
SCSI is considerably faster. IDE transfer rates that are listed are usually bursts. SCSI is much faster at sustained transfers, and is much more expensive.
 
Well, SCSI just about always beats out EIDE drives (with very few execptions). But, of course SCSI is also more expensive than EIDE. The drives themselves cost more, and a good SCSI controller card will cost you too (unless you luck out and have onboard SCSI on your motherboard).

The performance gap between SCSI and EIDE is decreasing though, and I found an excellent EIDE solution for myself. Went with a RAID 0 (two drives acting as one) configuration. (no redundancy though, so technically a RAID 0 has twice the failure possibility, but I do weekly backups).

Bought 2 Maxtor 60G hard drives (act as one 120G) and a Promise Fastrak TX2 Raid controller card. Cost me less than $300 USD for all three, and it's a good price/performance ratio.
 
Well, I use scsi because a few years back the difference with ide was large. But now, the difference in performance is much smaller, and for most setups it does not matter anymore.

Scsi has lower access times, and faster rpm drives. More important, the cost is large. Controllers are not cheap and the drives are expensive (check a few online stores). But you can hook up to 15 drives (devices) on 1 controller. The 10000 rpm and higher make noise and will probably need a fan. But the drives are of high quality. Very large drives are horribly expensive and much larger than 73GB is rare.

Ide on the other hand is cheap and will give you a lot of tracks if you get a fast drive. If you want even more go the way Looney descibes. These ide arrays are sometimes faster than scsi arrays (go over to 2cpu forum under storage for some numbers). And you might not want to pay for a scsi array controller once you see those prices :)

Most important for audio (certainly video) is the sustained transfer rate of the drive you buy, be it ide or scsi. Not every manufacturer lists this as it is about 1.5 times less than the burst rate. Also the way you format it can make a difference. One thing: make your choice and stick with it, don't mix ide and scsi.
 
the new 8mb cache ide HD's have out performed a few scsi's... i just ordered a 120gig today
 
For a audio workstation application, there will be no measureable difference in perfomance between a new IDE drive and a new SCSI drive, using a new motherboard and/or controller. Period.
 
In RAID 0 The drives are "striped" for performance. 2 60 gig drives gives you 60 gigs of storage. In RAID 1 the drives are mirrored for redundancy. 2 60 gig drives gives you 60 gigs of storage.

Twist
 
In RAID 0 The drives are "striped" for performance. 2 60 gig drives gives you 60 gigs of storage.
Click to expand...

Um, I think you meant to say that two 60G hard drives give you 120G storage. ;)

RAID 0

RAID 0 uses a technique called data striping. Multiple hard drives are combined to make one large volume. RAID 0 can read and write faster than a non-RAID configuration, since it splits the data and accesses both drives in parallel. RAID 0 does not provide any data redundancy. RAID 0 requires at least two hard drives.

RAID 1

RAID 1 mirrors or duplicates the content of one drive onto another equally sized drive. Mirroring provides optimal data integrity and immediate access to your data if one drive fails. RAID 1 allows you to use only half of the available capacity of your NAS device. RAID 1 requires at least two hard drives and must consist of an even number of drives.

RAID 5

RAID 5 provides the best balance of data redundancy and capacity. Like RAID 0, RAID 5 stripes all of the available drives into one large volume; however, the space equivalent to one of the hard drives will be used to store parity data. If one hard drive fails, your NAS will rebuild your data using the parity data. RAID 5 requires at least 3 hard drives. You may also use a RAID 5 configuration with hot spare, which reserves an additional hard drive that is swapped in immediately if a drive failure occurs. The total RAID capacity is the sum of all the hard drives minus the space of two drives. RAID 5 with hot spare requires at least 4 hard drives.

There is also RAID 0+1 (4 drives only) that is a striped/mirrored setup. Two of the drives are set up for performance, while the other two drives mirror the first two. Storage capacity is equivalent to two drives.
 
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