SCSI Drive Score

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punkin

punkin

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I just scored 4 each brand new Cheetah 320 SCSI hard drives...cheap! I'm thinking of the possibilities but to be honest, I don't know much about the SCSI interface. How big a deal is it to get these into a PC platform that doesn't have SCSI interfaces on the MOBO? I would imagine that there are PCI adapters or something.

Thanks
 
there are pci adaptors. two companies that i can think of are promise and adaptech. It may be a little tricky to get them configured and up and runnig. depending on the types of capability you want them to have, the cost may vary. ex. raid controller
 
The cabling and terminations could set you back a few bucks.

I would go with an Adaptec card. They are THE name in SCSI cards.

You will need to make sure you are using the right kinds of cables, and that your card will utilize the full potential of the card.

SCSI has some "odd" nomenclatures that you will need to become familiar with.

Those drive should give you some KICK ASS performance though! Are they 15,000 rpm?
 
Thanks kids...I've got a controller on order from NewEgg. 2 of the drives are 10k rpm and 2 are 15k rpm. I'm thinking of just using them in pairs raid 0 each (2 drives in the end) for a dual boot system. I've got several SATA drives for storage.
 
Why RAID?

I have a ATA 100 7200rpm 8mb buffer IDE drive, and yesterday, I loaded up 207 tracks of 24 bit 44.1 audio in a Sonar project and it played back. Your SCSI drives can SMOKE those numbers just running regular.

I can't possibly see how you would need more than THAT kind of track count.

Save your money and just do regular SCSI. If you are thinking of doing dynamic backup's, THEN RAID 1 makes some sense.

A SCSI RAID controller is about $200 more than a regular SCSI controller. Doesn't make any sense to spend $200 for performance that you don't need.
 
I got the drives at a bargain (no cost) part of a project that's finishing up. There's a.ways a lot of left over materials when we wrap up and I figured that taking more than 4 was just plain greedy. I'm just jumping into this as a personal past time, learning project. The drives are pretty small in terms of storage capacity. I don't see them as being very valuable for audio recording purposes but I could see them used for OS and application files working out quite nicely.
 
Still, truthfully, aside from Windows loading up maybe 3 seconds faster, I don't see any value in a RAID 0. The nearly $300 price tag for a RAID0 capable controller card just seems really steep for a "learning project", unless you are made of money! ;)

For that kind of money, you could put together an even FASTER IDE or SATA RAID setup.

I am just suggesting to save your money on that rather expensive SCSI RAID controller. But, it IS your money.
 
Ford Van said:
Still, truthfully, aside from Windows loading up maybe 3 seconds faster, I don't see any value in a RAID 0. The nearly $300 price tag for a RAID0 capable controller card just seems really steep for a "learning project", unless you are made of money! ;)

For that kind of money, you could put together an even FASTER IDE or SATA RAID setup.

I am just suggesting to save your money on that rather expensive SCSI RAID controller. But, it IS your money.
Click to expand...

+1. Doesn't make a lot of sense to take something that was free and spend a ton of money on it. And IMO, RAID 0 is risky business, because if one disk fails you lose all data.

While SCSI is definitely the tits when it comes to servers - situations where a lot of processes are hitting a lot of files concurrently - it's of little practical benefit when dealing with single-user applications which hit a few big files - like audio recording.
 
Well...now I'm bummed...maybe I shoulda posted..."I scored 4 SCSI drives, what should I do with them?"

The controller is on the way...so lets set that thought to the side. I can do what ever I like with the drives now. What would you do with this...set up 4 single drives in the chassis plus the 2 SATA's I've got laying around?

I should also point out that I'm not messing with my primary computers...it's just a hobby/project so I'm not too worried about the results, just hoping to put together a fairly hot performer. I've got a pile of stuff laying around. Plenty to assemble another PC with...I'm just suddenly inpired due to the SCSI score.

Some of the parts on hand I plan to use to assemble the project pc;

4 SCSI drives
2 SATA's
P4 3.0
RAM -O- Plenty
ASUS P4C800 mobo
Radeon 9800 Pro
Audigy SB
Antec Phantom 350 power supply

From my estimations, this combination should render a decent modder's platform. Once I get it up and running, I'm going to dabble with water cooling but, one thing at a time :)
 
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