Hot? $50 73GB SCSI U160 10K

SCSI... Would an avarice MoBo have SCSI connectors on it? I don't think mine does... If it was IDE I'd be all over it in a second.
 
Obi_Kwiet said:
SCSI... Would an avarice MoBo have SCSI connectors on it? I don't think mine does... If it was IDE I'd be all over it in a second.
you are aware that they make pci scsi adapters...by the way this drive will run circles around a raptor but itll be even louder than the alread loud raptor
 
cell_491 said:
you are aware that they make pci scsi adapters...by the way this drive will run circles around a raptor but itll be even louder than the alread loud raptor

I'm hoping so! I bought 3 of them for a RAID-5. Also purchased a 3x 5.25" Bay to 5x 3.5" Bay Hot-swap enclosure, 68-pin SCSI card (Enclosure has 68-pin outside, 80 pin inside), and cable. I'm REALLY hoping that the 1.6" drives will fit in the 1" enclosure. I will dremel if nessecary.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
I'm REALLY hoping that the 1.6" drives will fit in the 1" enclosure. I will dremel if nessecary.

1.6" is nearly half again the size of 1". Nearly the hieght of a CDROM.

Very good price on these! Typically drives these sizes and speed for this little money are Fibre channel drivest(very hard to get a controller cheaply). If I wasn't poor I'd grab a couple of these for the Compaq Proliant I have laying around.
 
cell_491 said:
...by the way this drive will run circles around a raptor but itll be even louder than the alread loud raptor
Not really..These are U160..if they were U320, maybe.
My 74 Raptor and my Fujitsu MAS benchmark pretty close to one another
64.8 MB/s for the Raptor and 74.6 MB/s for the Fujitsu...
The SCSI will shine in acces time..... 8 MS for the Raptor and 5.5 for the SCSI

Also, I dont have any noise issues with either one
 
Crosshairs said:
Not really..These are U160..if they were U320, maybe.
My 74 Raptor and my Fujitsu MAS benchmark pretty close to one another
64.8 MB/s for the Raptor and 74.6 MB/s for the Fujitsu...
The SCSI will shine in acess time 8 MS for the Raptor and 5.5 for the SCSI

Also, I dont have any noise issues with either one
yea scsi drives have awesome acces times
 
Crosshairs said:
Not really..These are U160..if they were U320, maybe.
My 74 Raptor and my Fujitsu MAS benchmark pretty close to one another
64.8 MB/s for the Raptor and 74.6 MB/s for the Fujitsu...
The SCSI will shine in acess time 8 MS for the Raptor and 5.5 for the SCSI

Also, I dont have any noise issues with either one

I have a 18gig cheetah 15k as my main HD running on a adaptec 29160.

I wanted more room, so I gave a pair of raptors a try. Even running in raid0, I wasn't impressed compared to the speeds the cheetah was giving me. I sold both of them and picked up a 10k hitach for gaming.

If this is the 1.6" size, these hard drives are OLD and of questionable quality.
 
onetrueday said:
I have a 18gig cheetah 15k as my main HD running on a adaptec 29160.

I wanted more room, so I gave a pair of raptors a try. Even running in raid0, I wasn't impressed compared to the speeds the cheetah was giving me. I sold both of them and picked up a 10k hitach for gaming.

If this is the 1.6" size, these hard drives are OLD and of questionable quality.
Yeah, I have a Fujitsu MAS 18 gig on a 29160 as my OS drive at work...With74 GIG Raptors for storage .
On my home system, Ihave a 74 GIG Raptor for OS, another one for Games and a 160 PATA drive for storage.
The SCSI benches better, but not by much .

I used to have a pair of 36's in RAID 0..was NOT impressed....But the 74's are beter and faster than the 36's
 
5 of those in RAID5 will eat up your entire PCI bandwith. good luck listening to music or playing a online game if your network controller is on the same PCI bus.

not that speed is bad or anything but putting super fast drives on the 33 Mhz PCI bus is going to give you :mad:

now if you have a 64 bit PCI bus or PCIx with a SCSI controller to match, thats another story :)
 
I should buy one of these and put my windows install on this harddrive, except I dont have a SCSI controller card and I dont know what a good price of one is :rolleyes:
 
robberbaron said:
That still wont tell you the bang/buck. ;) What are some recommended brands for SCSI controllers?

I have an Adaptec 29160..... I bought it after doing some research...
It works fine for me, but the controller card you chose all depends on what your intentions are with SCSI...
 
Crosshairs said:
I have an Adaptec 29160..... I bought it after doing some research...
It works fine for me, but the controller card you chose all depends on what your intentions are with SCSI...

I wouldnt be interested in fancy raid stuff. I'd only want an 18 gig scsi for the OS.
 
robberbaron said:
I wouldnt be interested in fancy raid stuff. I'd only want an 18 gig scsi for the OS.

If you need nothing fancy, don't pay for nothin' fancy. Cheapo 80-pin SCSI card would work. You'll probably want to get one with 80-pin AND 68-pin, just in case, thought. And every SCSI controller I've ever used has been Adaptec... Never once had a problem.
 
cell_491 said:
yea scsi drives have awesome acces times

This is what I don't get about SCSI drives.

if an IDE drive and a SCSI drive both have the same rotational speed, and arm movement speed, shouldn't the access times be virtually the same.

Does the arm just move faster in a SCSI drive or what?
 
Guys, if you do move on this deal, some things to remember (from an owner of two of them):

A) They are 6 platter, 10K, ball-bearing motor drives. They run very loud, and very hot. Cooling for these drives is a MUST. Also, as aleady mentioned, they are 60% taller than 'regular' hard drives. Make sure your case, enclosure, etc, will accomodate one of these larger drives before purchasing.
B) They are 80 pin SCA drives. You will need to purchase either SCSI to SCA (68 pin to 80) adapters, or acquire an SCA backplane, in addition to a SCSI HBA and cable(s). these drives are on Overstock pretty frequently, and often they will have two SKUs, one with a SCSI to SCA adapter thrown in for a few extra dollars.
C) I do not want this to be construed as thread crapping, but these drives are slower in desktop performance than virtually any recent 7200RPM dekstop drive with an 8MB buffer. StorageReview reviewed this drive in May of 2000, and there have been numerous advances in hard drive performance since then. If you are looking at these drives as a cheap Raptor killer, don't bother. With only a 4MB buffer that does not benefit from five years of buffer optimizations and peak sustained transfer rates well below 40MB/sec, you need to look elsewhere.

In short, these drives are competitively priced, but look before you leap. They have some drawbacks that justify the low price. Educate yourself before proceeding with this deal.
 
thanks for that input. I never look before I leap...I receive counseling for that lol :D
 
Beat me to it DougLite! :D

As for the "deal" on these drives, it's okay I suppose, in terms of price/gig. But it's not special whatsoever. A quick check on e-bay shows the average ending price being about $70 for these, + shipping
 
Aye. Thanks for the heads-up, DougLite. I, too, have problems looking before I leap. That's why I'm planning on selling the drives as soon as they get here and purchasing some 36GB 1" drives instead.

Just to check, I shouldn't need anything more than the following, right?

PCI SCSI card (68-pin) -> Enclosure (68-pin outside, 80-pin inside) -> SCSI disk
 
The thing you must remember about scsi harddrives that is better then ide drives, is that scsi has a much smaller CPU overhead.

For the poster who said the drives are comparable. You dump a scsi card into that box, and put your swap file on that scsi drive, and i guarntee you will not quote this again.
 
holyone said:
For the poster who said the drives are comparable. You dump a scsi card into that box, and put your swap file on that scsi drive, and i guarntee you will not quote this again.

I don't think he was talking about SCSI drives in general, more like these specific SCSI drives (which are quite antiquated)
 
SATA uses the CPU for managing data flow; SCSI doesn't. SATA relies on using the CPU for managing its data flow, another legacy inheritance from the ATA/IDE standard. SCSI controllers offload the management of data flow to the controller's own dedicated hardware, which means faster overall throughput. While the amount of CPU load that SATA imposes on the system is nowhere near what it used to be in the older ATA/IDE standards, there is still the overhead required to go to and from the CPU -- and that's CPU power and bus bandwidth best devoted to other things.
 
The difference in CPU usage is not enough to justify getting these drives. What you gain in CPU, you lose in raw I/O

Holyone: The comparison was 3 or 4 generation-back 10K SCSI to current 7.2K SATA. I would whole-heartedly agree that last and current generation SCSI will handily match and outperform current SATA drives, but that's not what we're talking about here.
 
Crazy what you can learn from a Hotdeal thread about SCSI Drives :)
Thanks for all the info :cool:
 
quality SCSI RAID controllers are way too expensive to be thinking RAID with these drives. Hold out for $75 73Gb 15k drives that come around fairly often.
 
farkedup said:
quality SCSI RAID controllers are way too expensive to be thinking RAID with these drives. Hold out for $75 73Gb 15k drives that come around fairly often.
agreed a 15k drive would be BADASS
 
i am sorry sir but you are wrong

I speak from experience not just some tomshardware or anadtech article u read last week.


Even this "shitty" scsi drive as a swap file drive will outperform your sata drive, it is a very good deal in those terms.


Please grab a clupon before driving thru.
 
actually i dont even care if its a good deal, now i want you all to run out and try putting even a shitty scsi drive in your computer with the swap on it so you can see first hand =)

Trust boxingnun =)
 
holyone said:
actually i dont even care if its a good deal, now i want you all to run out and try putting even a shitty scsi drive in your computer with the swap on it so you can see first hand =)

Trust boxingnun =)

From everything I've read online, the 74GB Raptor is on par with the U160 10K drives in every aspect but access time. SCSI controllers are cheap via eBay. I'm not saying these drives are faster. I think they're about the same. But I'll see once they actually get here.

Well, if I can manage to plug one in. I don't have an 80-68 pin adaptor.
 
Storagereview.com is THE place for all things hard drive, and their database has this model of SCSI drive, or rather the one's closest in model to it, just below the WD800JB in their gaming benchmark.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

On 15k drives, having a 15k doesn't really mean all that much. I went the SCSI route with a Seagate Cheetah 15K 36 series drive on an Adaptec 19160 with 3 36Gb drives for storage. They were hot, loud and not very fast. My 7200.7 Seagate 120Gb had a slightly lower burst speed and initial sustained transfere but outperformed on the outer regions of the platters.

To beat a Raptor, a 15K.3 drive / equivalent is necessary. As long as no Raid setup is used, a cheapo U160 controller is plenty, it is not as if the PCI bus could take the entire bandwidth afforded by the U160 spec.

Now if you're going to be running a server, it is a completely different story . . .
 
Pete84 said:
Storagereview.com is THE place for all things hard drive, and their database has this model of SCSI drive, or rather the one's closest in model to it, just below the WD800JB in their gaming benchmark.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

On 15k drives, having a 15k doesn't really mean all that much. I went the SCSI route with a Seagate Cheetah 15K 36 series drive on an Adaptec 19160 with 3 36Gb drives for storage. They were hot, loud and not very fast. My 7200.7 Seagate 120Gb had a slightly lower burst speed and initial sustained transfere but outperformed on the outer regions of the platters.

To beat a Raptor, a 15K.3 drive / equivalent is necessary. As long as no Raid setup is used, a cheapo U160 controller is plenty, it is not as if the PCI bus could take the entire bandwidth afforded by the U160 spec.

Now if you're going to be running a server, it is a completely different story . . .

That link is does not match the drives here. See my earlier post for the review of these drives. Pete's link is to a somewhat newer 73GB SCSI drive that uses 4 18GB platters, that will perform quite a bit better as it is a newer drive. The drives in the OP are so old, they were reviewed before the launch of SR's Testbed III - that's why you don't see them in the performance database. The rest of what Pete said is quite true, don't wanna take away from that.

And yes TeeJay, the Atlas 15K II blows away the Raptor in everything.

HolyOne is right that SCSI has some advantages in much reduced command overhead - but physical RAM will blow away a SCSI drive in performance. 512MB of DDR400 is less than $50, get that instead of investing in a SCSI subsystem for your page file ;) I don't want to start a debate on HDD interfaces though, at least not in [H]otDeals :p

For those of you that learned some things in this thread, your welcome. Drop by Disk Storage Systems if you ever go crazy with desire to learn more about hard drives. Not that you will ;)
 
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