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Blew up my SCSI ......

T

tracerwilly

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2004
Messages
136
Well, it was 4 years old, so i guess it was about time finally. i was just sitting and doin stuff on the internet when i heard click,click,click. then i heard CLICK,CLICK,CLICK,BOOM. BSOD pops up and then swoosh, kicks me into DOS mode with a black screen that says "system cannot access your disk drive". that was it, so now i'm thinkin - crap, $250 for a new drive. well, i got out my mobo manual(who would think to look there) and i find out i have an onboard Ultra ATA133 controller. :eek: :eek: Sweeet!!! so i go out and get a new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 30 gig and slap it in there. then i load the OS and tweak it up and then run HD Tach. OMG, i get a read burst rate of 105 megs per sec and a sustained throughput of 52 megs per sec. This is better than my Seagate Cheetah X-15 EVER got. i guess it is the difference of havin onboard versus a PCI SCSI adapter, but i highly recommend this drive ($80 for a 30 gig).
 
heh, I used to think my diamond max 9 was quick until I bought a 15k.3 cheetah, then I quickly moved it over to hold my data rather than my OS :p

BTW, you can pickup a new 15k.3 cheetah for a bit less than 250 bucks, granted its an 18 gigger, but wtf needs more than 18 gig for the OS and apps? :cool:
 
So the ATA really works better than your old 15k rpm drive? I have the same 15k drive, maybe I should switch the OS to my 120GB WD and scrap the loud scsi drive.
 
well, the read access time is actually 1.5 milliseconds slower than the SCSI. but due to having to load up the bios for the adaptec SCSI controller AND transfer data thru the PCI bus i feel the Maxtor is far better. i reduced my push button on startup to on the internet time from 23 seconds with the SCSI to 15 seconds flat with the Maxtor.

P.S. - if i did go with Seagate again (and the Cheetah is a good drive) i would get the Ultra 320 and a mobo with onboard SCSI controller like the Tyan or Gigabyte.
 
One trick to speed up boot times with SCSI controllers in a system is to disable SCSI IDs that are not in use by any devices. (at least I know you can do this with LSI SCSI BIOSes, not sure about others) The reason SCSI BIOSes usually take so long to load is that they must go out on the SCSI bus and scan the bus to find any connected devices. This consists of trying to select an ID and seeing if a device responds within the selection timeout period.

If you have a wide SCSI bus (most modern SCSI buses would be), there are up to 16 addressable devices on each bus. So if you have a two channel controller, you could have up to 32 devices. The selection timeout period is a minimum of 250 milliseconds. So if you have a dual channel controller with only one target device you'd end up with 29 selection timeouts to endure ( since the controller claims an ID on each channel, there would be two fewer plus the number of target devices). That's 7.25 seconds of timeouts you have to wait for and the reason why SCSI controllers seem to take a long time for the BIOS to load. So by disabling IDs that you aren't using you can prevent the controller from trying to talk to devices that aren't there.

This could even compound savings as some OSes will do another scan on their own once the driver as loaded. Some drivers will obey the BIOS settings and not scan devices that are disabled.
 
WTF!!!

You spent how much for a 30GB hard drive? You got bent over and raped!
CompUSA has a 120GB on sale for $60, and a 250GB for $130.

And thats burst speed off the cache... Once you start to load it down some, you will find that you have nothing special.
 
Thx UI, i did do that by entering the Adaptec BIOS, heh...even flashed a new BIOS on the adapter. I also used Powerstrip to reduce the PCI latency to zero on the adapter. I guess i'm just amazed at the performance of this new drive. It rocks !!!
 
No real point in having a single one of those drives on 32/33 PCI. The real bennefist of having those things come out when you get a big-ass RAID full of them on a fast 64bit PCI controller.
 
although having multiples on a 64bit interface in a RAID is nice, just having one on a single channel still blows most IDE drives out of the water. So you saying that would really only refer to those who want a high end storage system, which dont get me wrong is very nice, but not very economical.
 
QHalo said:
heh, I used to think my diamond max 9 was quick until I bought a 15k.3 cheetah, then I quickly moved it over to hold my data rather than my OS :p

BTW, you can pickup a new 15k.3 cheetah for a bit less than 250 bucks, granted its an 18 gigger, but wtf needs more than 18 gig for the OS and apps? :cool:
Click to expand...

Actually, 15k.3's are well under 200 these days. I bought mine for 205 about a year ago or so. Maybe it was more than that... I don't remember. At any rate, they are cheaper now. Newegg's got them for 183.
 
Answers/Remarks to above posts :

CentronME : the drive u linked to is an ATA100 versus the Ultra ATA133 i purchased. Also, i don't need storage. This is the largest volume drive i have ever owned at 30 gig. anything worth keeping i burn to disc.

ameoba: right u are, i purchased it cuz the mobo had the controller on board BUT when Longhorn comes out i will surely go back to SCSI.

QHalo : Right, not economical like CentronME suggested but yes for $60 more on the 120 gig drive it rocks.

Dark Ember: Whoa, u are right . i just priced a 18.4 gig 15K.3 for $141 on pricegrabber. The 320 SCSI adapter makes it unaffordable to me right now tho. i have the 160 Adaptec.
 
tracerwilly said:
Dark Ember: Whoa, u are right . i just priced a 18.4 gig 15K.3 for $141 on pricegrabber. The 320 SCSI adapter makes it unaffordable to me right now tho. i have the 160 Adaptec.
Click to expand...

You actually don't need a U320 controller to use the U320 drive. The interfaces are backwards compatible, so the 15k.3 would work just fine with your U160 controller. The transfer rates on the drive aren't enough to saturate the U160 interface anyway. Also, unless you are using 64 bit pci cards, then pci can only handle 133 megs/sec anyway, so you can't even use all of the U160 interface with it, much less a U320 one.
 
but would this affect the 3.9 ms versus the 6.9 ms read speed of the 320 versus the 160 when using the 160 adapter? i mean, with a 105 meg/sec read burst speed with the Maxtor i'm pretty close anyway to 133.
 
IMO read burst < access time unless all you do is sustained reads of large files (constant FTP of big RARs?). When you are loading an applications or even serving files the system will access a lot of files so your access time should be more important.

If you are a developer with VS.NET and other tools you can actually fill up a 30 gig partition quite quick. :)
 
Run HDTach on both of those drivers and then come back and talk to me :p

But seriously, thats burst, sustained transfer rates on that drive are going to be somewhere in the 50-60 range, and on scsi in the 80-90 range. And I might be mistaken, but seek times are not affected by U320 or U160. It's relative to the drive, not the interface.

Also when talking IDE and SCSI, you need to take into consideration the cpu usage of IDE. I bet that Maxtor uses somewhere in the range of 15-20% cpu power to do that. It could be less, but I doubt by much. My 15k.3 drive used 2.5% cpu power. ;)

I'm not slamming you in any way, I'm just showing how much nicer (if you can afford it) SCSI is over IDE. Of course you are not going to get the full benefits and really the true nature of having a SCSI setup is unless you are multitasking and such, so take it for what you will. Good hunting. :)
 
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