SCSI vs 7200rpm

N

nuss

New member
Just curious to know what the debate is.

Is scuzzy really worth the extra price? Will it be that much faster and more stable?

Please advise before i spend a lot of money for nothing!

Thanx in advance!

PS- In Canada, i can get dual 30gb 7200rpm HD's for 2/3 the cost of one scsi 20gb!
 
Never used SCSI, but I've had no problems at all recording audio on a 30 gig 7200 RPM IDE. Running 10-12 tracks typically with real-time reverb and other FX on most of them. Can't imagine what SCSI would give me for the extra money.
 
Okay,Okay, If I were rich and wanted to squeeze out a little
more speed I might buy scuz drives or If I had a real pro studio and had the money to spend I might. But my butt is at
home and I really dont need it to acomplish what I want in my own good time. I can spend the money I save on Ide drives
on something like books that teach me how to record or get that new software I wanted. I also dont need Java scripts or flashmedia or popup windows selling me something or IBM dos or programs that put microsoft internet explorer automatically on my computer with out asking me. (up yours bill) Theres always some joker who tells me how big and bad there product is and in the long run its just mostly hype.
Buy ide. Speed is not always everything its cracked up to be.
Merry Christmas to all and goodnight. :)

Duck
 
SCSI Performs

Okay, this statement comes from a new user - a computer nerd who is now experimenting with home recording on his computer. I have not done much recording yet but have made some cd's from tapes for some people who were starting to wear out there tapes. I am currently running ultra ide 66mbps on a Maxtor DiamondMax7200rpm hard drive. The drive has a 2mb sdram buffer and dual processors on the drive. It is great and fast but compared to the right kind of scsi it is nothing in comparison.

The newest and fastest scsi hard drives and controllers out there are all Ultra SCSI 3 (aka Ultra SCSI 160
). This technology is much faster than ide any ide drive and more reliable. The fastest ide drives available on the market currently are 7200rpm The fastest SCSI drive I could find was an 18.4gb 15,000rpm Seagate Cheetah Ultra SCSI 160 drive that had an average seek time of 3.9ms!!

Now if you were trying to get even faster you could buy a Ultra SCSI 160 raid controller capable of RAID 0 and 1. Then hook two Seagate cheetahs up to it. RAID 1 would mirror anything you did with your primary drive onto the second one and if one failed the second would automatically kick in. (this is for server reliability) RAID 0 splits the load between the 2 drives so when you are loading something it loads from both drives - although you better have a processor that can keep up if you dou that.

Now I know that this drive costs $500 and that is is probably overkill for the average joe. Although as you record huge sound files onto your hard drive possibly in the new 24/96 format you can fill up your ram pretty stinking quick and when that happens your hard drive is used as virtual ram. Thats when that faster hard drive can really help. One last thing - If you have 2 drives on the same ide channel lets say a hard drive and a cdrom then the controller can only talk to one at a time. If you put your hard drive and cdrom on different channels (primary and secondary) then there can be simoultaneous data transfer. SCSI can do simoltaneous no matter what.

Sorry this got a little long but I wan't you to know this is a large difference in performance between ide and scsi. Just look at all the servers for sale out there they have scsi equipment because they need to be fast and reliable.
 
SCSI CD ROM/R/RW

Hmmmm... just another quick comment:

SCSI cdrom drives can also vastly improve the speed of certain sytem operations. You can read, write, rewrite, and rip drastically faster with SCSI cd roms/rw's.
 
IDE vs SCSI

Ok this statement comes from someone who is NOT a new user - I have been doing PC support for a long time.

For what you want to do a good IDE drive (and I am speaking of Ultra 66 or 100) is absolutely just as good as SCSI.

SCSI is the way to go if you are having multiple users or processes hitting the drive at the same time (which is why SCSI is strongly prefered in file servers), or if you are going to use many devices in a single machine (a single SCSI card uses one IRQ and supports up to 7 devices, vs one IRQ and only two devices per IDE controller). If you are using the system for recording and not much else an IDE drive is just fine. Use the $$$$ you save for something else.

And incidently, the latest Ultra 100 drives actually benchmark as fast or faster than any SCSI drive out there. Check Tom's Hardware site or the Maximum PC web site if you are curious.
 
That prorec.com article mentioned above is a great read. At least check out the summary at the end, it says a lot. In my mind SCSI is absolutely not worth the price premium when an IDE drive will do everything that most home recorders will need. And those who tell you that SCSI is always significantly faster than IDE is wrong. Check out this quote from the article:

"Although there are places for SCSI where IDE dare not go, one of them is NOT the digital audio workstation. Here, IDE can outperform SCSI just as often as SCSI can outperform IDE, in both cases usually not significantly and not even consistently."

Drive specs don't tell the whole story, just like the MHz rating of a CPU or a video card don't mean much in real-world applications.
 
GRRRR

When I said new user I meant at this site not computer.

I have experience with many different scsi devices and scsi always pulls through. By the way when I here of faster external transfer rates (when ultra 33,66,and 100 came out)I didn't really care at all because it's the internal specs that really matter. When I jumped from 5400 to 7200rpm I was very amazed at the difference in speed and my 5400 and 7200 were both at 33mbs. I could almost care less about external data rates. Imagine a drive spinning twice the speed of another 7200rpm drive. FAST FAST FAST

SCSI RULES - IDE DROOLS

*and if I weren't so cheap I would be running a faster scsi drive in my system right now. I already run scsi cdroms
 
Data transfer rates accross the IDE bus absolutely do matter. It has a direct bearing on how quickly data can be moved from RAM to hard drive, and visa versa. When you are doing digital recording you are moving data directly accross this bus.

However I do agree that many SCSI CD-ROMS have one advantage over their IDE cousins. While in use IDE CDROMs typically cause a greater CPU "hit" while SCSI CD-ROMs are using their controller card instead. But the newer IDE CD-ROMS are much more efficent than earlier models, and it is not a problem in most cases.
 
We've been over this subject a gazillion times already and it always ends with religious mud slinging. Anyone interested can do a search and wade through all the posts, information and views. Then, and only then, feel free to post anything new to the debate. Detailed, real-life, DAW-oriented benchmarks are also welcome.

/Ola

P.s Check out PC vs. Mac while you're at it. d.s.
 
my new IBM rocks

Just picked up a new IDE IBM for $180. My tests show that it writes at about 18 megs a sec and reads 24. That, and it's nearly silent. SCSI always leads the pack but you pay a premium and it's reaching a point of diminishing returns. My guess is I could read more then 100 mono tracks from this drive.
What more would an average daw user need?
-Wes
 
another link

Another link to check before you buy a drive is
http://www.storagereview.com
They bechmark the current crop of drives. I also remember reading some articles there on the IDE vs SCSI debate.
They concure that IDE is as fast for "non-server" applications. Really, the bottom line is that scsi is a multitasking buss and IDE isn't. So it really only makes a difference when you have 10 drives on a buss(which IDE can't do) and they are all taking hits.
BTW, has anybody had strange behavior from the promise fastrack. I was using it with my new IBM drive and the performance suffered in strange ways. I then moved the drive from my fasttrack 66
and back to the motherboards udma 33 and the performance soared. It was almost like DMA wasn't checked with the fasttrack and it was using %100 CPU. It also didn't give me a choice for checking DMA so I assumed that it defaulted to DMA. Anyway, just curious about the performance others are getting...
-Wes
 
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