How do SCSI hdd's compare to SATA hdd's???

You know, when you ask questions like that, what kind of quality do you expect from the answer?

What are you looking for?

A price comparison?
A single-user performance comparison?
Multi-user?
An interface features comparison?

How about you name a budget, tell us what you do with your computer, and how much capacity you'll need, and we can get somewhere.
 
What I meant was how do they compare hdd to hdd...like if the question was IDE vs SATA then one thing would be SATA's are hella faster...not looking for a price comparison...just a SCSI hdd compared to a SATA hdd...
 
which SCSI and which SATA drives?

Understand, we are not asking these questions to be dicks at all, it is just hard to answer such a question in less than a page or two! For instance, it would be like asking "which cars are better: v6's or v8's?" The reason the question needs clarification is because you are comparing every aspect of two different methods of connecting essentially the same hardware to a computer and asking which is "better", which is in itself, objective.

Now, just to humor you/myself, I will assume you mean "I am thinking of getting another hard drive/ hard drives, and would like to know if I should go with SATA or SCSI?". If you are accessing huge amounts of data and speed is an issue (e.g. multi-track music recording, video editing, huge 3D animation, etc.) then a well set-up SCSI system is a very good choice, assuming you know wtf you're doing and money doesn't matter too much. If, however, you are an average user (some photoshop, gaming, cd/dvd burning), pretty much any drive will work for you. If you want some extra speed while loading said games/photoshop documents, the WD Raptor drives are as close to SCSI performance as you could ever want/need (or be able to tell the difference between) for that stuff.

Hope that helps! :D
 
It's a pure price/performance trade off really.
15,000 rpm SCSIs are the fastest drives around, plain and simple.
The average SCSI is also more reliable than the average ATA/SATA.
This isn't really suprising as they also cost more. A lot more.

In the middle there are the 10,000 rpm SCSI and Raptor SATA drives. The 10k SCSIs aren't really worth it over the Raptor unless you need a lot of drives, as the cost of a lot of controllers or controllers w/ a whole bunch of SATA ports adds up fast. You'd need 2 $700 3ware controllers plus 6 more ports to match the number of drives a $130 SCSI HBA can support. Then there's the where the hell do I put 30 HDs problem. The SCSIs just go in an couple external boxes. I don't want to think about 30 SATA cables in my case... SCSIs cost $70-100 more plus you need a controller ($130 for a nice dual channel Ultra 320 LSI card). The jury's still out on how reliable the Raptor is (since it's fairly new & WD has little track record w/ 10k drives), but it looks good so far and certainly isn't an IBM 60/75 GXP disaster type model and is probably better than your average IDE drive.

Personally I think a fast 15k rpm boot drive is nice to have. If that's too rich for you just get a Raptor. The rest of my storage is actually older SCSI and FC-AL disks. It's a mix of previous boot drives and cheap refurbs. I actually just ordered some more cheap refurbs- 2 36GB 15k.3s ($90 ea) and an old model (1.6") 73GB. ($99)
If you don't want to mess around with refurbs (you do get a few duds), I'd go w/ some regular IDE/SATA 7200 rpm drives for storage & a 73GB raptor for boot & apps. OTOH, I've actually had worse luck (% and total failures wise) with IDE drives than refurbs.

Here's most of my HD history:
Home systems are SCSI unless otherwise noted. (Even the WD)

Home:
1x 2.5GB WD IDE. Spring '96 $350. Sitting in an old P200.
1x 4GB 7.2k WD Summer '97, $700(!). Was boot drive, then moved down the ladder to storage. Died after 5.5 years (6 months after the warranty ran out.)
1x 4GB 7.2k Compaq. Free. Sitting in an old P200.
1x 9GB 10k rpm quantum. Fall '99, ~$300. Was boot drive, now scratch disk in server.
1x 18GB 10k IBM. Spring '01. ~$300. Still going.
11x 18GB 10k Seagate FC-AL refurbs. Summer '03. $200 for 10. One was DOA, sent it back for replacement. Another died a while later. 9 are still running.
1x 36GB 15k Seagate 15k.3 Summer '03 $280. My main rig's boot drive.
1x 40GB 5.4k Maxtor IDE. Winter '02. It's in my converted iMac. Works, but damn it's slow lol. I bought it for low heat dissapation since there's essentially no cooling in an iMac hard drive bay. It's a single platter drive and runs on ~4W.
Coming soon:
2x 36GB 15k Seagate 15k.3 $90 ea., reburbs. 1 for windows apps, 1 for Linux home dir.
1x 73GB 10k Seagate. $99. Refurb, will be storage drive.

I'm moving the FC-AL drives over to my dual P3 server box to free up a slot for a low profile gigabit nic & give my 6800GT some air. Plus having 9 FC-AL drives on the server box will let me run a nice fast Oracle setup on it.

Work: (previous job, all PATA)
2x 40GB 7.2k IBM 60GXP. One died after about a year. Then the replacement died after about a year. f'n Dell gave me 3 DeathStars in a row. The 3rd one ended up on a shelf...
2x 120GB 7.2k WDC1200JB. After the first IBM died I got a RAID controller and set these two up as a mirror. Good thing I did. One of them died after a bit over a year. I quit before the replacement showed up.
 
^^^^
Yeah...that's what I was looking for...but there's still something I'm wondering...if SCSI is faster than SATA and as far as we now as or more reliable than SATA then why is SATA all the rage nowadays??? There's gotta be SOMETHING out there that has ppl's attention on SATA drives...is it just cause it's new or something???
 
I'd also like to know what is so good about SATA drives. When I look at the read times, many are the same or higher than same EIDE drives. What is the benefit of SATA?
 
There isn't a significant *current* benefit to SATA performance-wise vs. PATA if you just look at a read/write test of a single HDD on a channel. The reason so many people (except for SCSI nuts like me) like them so much is they allow for a better setup with a bunch of devices.
If you just have 1 optical and 1 HD, all SATA gets you is a thin drive cable, unless it's attached to a WD Raptor in which case you get a speed boost as well.
The real advantage is that you can hook up more devices in an optimal configuration w/o getting a separate controller card. PATA devices give the best performance with once device per channel. Most mobos have 2 PATA channels, and a lot of people have 2 optical drives so they can do direct CD to CD (or DVD to DVD) copies. Without SATA ports, something would have to share a connector unless you have a controller card or that rare mobo w/ >2 PATA channels.
The other advantage is that 10,000 rpm WD Raptors are SATA only. They're about as fast as 10,000 rpm SCSI drives and cost a good bit less.
And, of course, it's the new thing and therefore cool :p
As for SCSI, the main reason so few people use it is the cost. SCSIs are massively expensive. A 146GB drive is $500. 5x PATA and SATA per gig. And that's just a 10k rpm drive. A shiny new 15k rpm 73GB disk is also $500. If they were the same price per gig or even close I think the majority on [H] would be using SCSI.

edit: Another important reason people use SATA is the PCI bus. Single CPU systems don't have 64-bit or 66MHz PCI slots except for a couple oddball server boards with no AGP port. The PCI bus is 132MB/s max, so SCSIs tend to saturate the bus. Your typical southbridge chip has a much faster connection to the northbridge, and has the SATA and PATA controllers built in. Thus in some cases a pair of ATA drives will actually outperform even the fastest of SCSI drives on a single CPU system. For example, copying a large file from one HD to another could easily be faster on ATA unless the SCSI machine is a duallie & has a 64-bit SCSI card. This advantage/problem will go away with PCI-express though. 1x PCI-e is about 500MB/s, so it's got plenty of speed for an Ultra320 SCSI bus.
 
Simplicity
Both in the way SATA drives are setup/configured, and by that I mean almost nothing involved, compared to the down-right voodoo that is SCSI termination sometimes, and a dozen jumpers per drive, and also from a manufacturer's standpoint. Since SATA isn't anything different than IDE over a serial interface, it's fairly cheap to implement, and also as was mentioned SCSI drives have a much higher standard to which they are built, which equates to higher cost. Try and find a consumer IDE drive that is rated for 1.2 million hours between failures. It also hasn't cost the industry very much to move to SATA, whereas a shift to making more SCSI drives and driving down cost would cost more.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Simplicity
Both in the way SATA drives are setup/configured, and by that I mean almost nothing involved, compared to the down-right voodoo that is SCSI termination sometimes, and a dozen jumpers per drive, and also from a manufacturer's standpoint. Since SATA isn't anything different than IDE over a serial interface, it's fairly cheap to implement, and also as was mentioned SCSI drives have a much higher standard to which they are built, which equates to higher cost. Try and find a consumer IDE drive that is rated for 1.2 million hours between failures. It also hasn't cost the industry very much to move to SATA, whereas a shift to making more SCSI drives and driving down cost would cost more.
Click to expand...

Making more SCSIs is easy, as easy as making SATA drives. Getting the cost down on the models available now would be hard, but who says a SCSI drive has to have a 1.2 million hour MTBF? They used to make SCSI drives based off IDE drives. 5400 and 5200 rpm models. They didn't cost nearly as much more than an IDE drive as current SCSI drives do. Then some of the first 7200 rpm IDEs were based off SCSI drives, or at least I think they were. The Seagate Barracuda was their high end 7200 rpm SCSI line for years. Then the Cheetahs came out, and eventually they quit making 7200rpm SCSIs alltogether. Now the once vaunted Barracuda name is their normal consumer line of hard drives. I think the Mac going IDE is what killed the cheap SCSI drives. As far as I remember Apple was the last holdout using consumer grade SCSIs in a world where everyone else was using IDE drives.
Making SCSI easy is a whole different problem. The only way I know of to do it is a backplane w/ sleds & SCA drives. Just screw the drive into the sled & slide it into the case. You don't even have to mess with cables. Of course, you do have to buy a $200 drive cage... SCSI is still easier to deal with in certain situations though. It's much simpler to plug 10 SCSI drives into one cable than it is to deal with 10 SATA cables flying all over the place. With SCSIs you can tear apart the machine, put the drives back, and plug them in wherever you want. The ID jumpers will keep the drives straight. With SATA no such luck... the drive's ID depends on where it's plugged in. So SATA is far easier for a single drive, and SCSI is better if you have a huge pile of them. Of course, that's the way it's always been.
 
zandor said:
Making more SCSIs is easy, as easy as making SATA drives. Getting the cost down on the models available now would be hard, but who says a SCSI drive has to have a 1.2 million hour MTBF?
Click to expand...
Converting a production line from PATA to SATA is as easy as a new cirucuit board design that you can slap on the same drive. If you take off the reliability of SCSI drives, where does that leave you? With a complex setup that requires a controller that most people don't have, that has almost no advantages over SATA and is still more expensive. Also, SCSI controllers will always be more expensive than SATA controllers. There are a plethora of motherboards out right now that have 2 and 4 channel SATA RAID that themselves cost less than a low-end Ultra160 RAID controller.
 
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