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Hows this SCSI controller card?

This is the important part: 64-bit/66MHz PCI

If you don't have one of those slots, you won't be able to utilize the full bandwidth that this card is capable of. Basically, if you don't know what it is then you don't need it.

PCI is good for 32-bit/33MHz on it's shared bus.

Tell us what drives you plan on using so that a better recommendation can be posted. That thing is way overkill and unnecessary for a desktop system.
 
I just built a sys. for someone using a LSI controler that uses the PCI-E slot and hooked to 2 Fujitsu drives. Bout $900, My Raptor X comes real close for desktop use. Think Hard!!!

Unless your need is for large amounts of data transfer between drives?.
 
What's your application? Are you going to use raid 0/1? Raid 5? Do you have pci express or PCI-X slots available? Have you settled on disks yet? Is SAS an option?
 
unhappy_mage said:
What's your application? Are you going to use raid 0/1? Raid 5? Do you have pci express or PCI-X slots available? Have you settled on disks yet? Is SAS an option?
Click to expand...

This is only to have faster drives.

Raid 0 with 15k drives.

Thats a possibility. Hows this card for PCI-X? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816118042

No I havent most likely low capcity 15k drives(36-146gb)

I dont really have any experience with SAS so thats why I picked SCSI but its a possibility for sure.
 
This card ($208 shipped) will let you drive up to 4 drives in raid 0 or 1. Fujitsu MAX drives are incredibly fast.

That said, check out storagereview's reviews of the WD Raptors compared to SCSI drives. You are not a multi-user workload. Take a look before you go spending on SAS.
 
unhappy_mage said:
This card ($208 shipped) will let you drive up to 4 drives in raid 0 or 1. Fujitsu MAX drives are incredibly fast.

That said, check out storagereview's reviews of the WD Raptors compared to SCSI drives. You are not a multi-user workload. Take a look before you go spending on SAS.
Click to expand...

Ill prolly end up with more than 4 drives though.

What raid would you reccomend for 4 or so of these or the 15k.4 seagate 36 gb drives.

Yea SAS looks like something ill be holding off of for now.

BTW, thanks for the help youve been great.

Also, When I was reffering to PCI-X I was actually referring to PCIe I just got confused.
 
Gotta recommend e-bay for stuff like this. Retail is never a good price.
Anyway, between the two cards you linked, the performance for RAID-0 is probably not that much different, just depends on your access patterns. More cache hits = the 320-1 ($100 or so on e-bay) is going to be better than the 20320 (which sell for around $80 on e-bay). The addition of the 64mb of onboard cache and support for 10, 5, 50 RAID levels is the difference between the cards. But, without doing RAID-5, the extra power of the 320-1 is probably going to waste.

Also, as mage noted, since this is for a desktop, a drive like the Raptor is going to be *much* better suited for your workload, cheaper, quieter, and cooler.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Gotta recommend e-bay for stuff like this. Retail is never a good price.
Anyway, between the two cards you linked, the performance for RAID-0 is probably not that much different, just depends on your access patterns. More cache hits = the 320-1 ($100 or so on e-bay) is going to be better than the 20320 (which sell for around $80 on e-bay). The addition of the 64mb of onboard cache and support for 10, 5, 50 RAID levels is the difference between the cards. But, without doing RAID-5, the extra power of the 320-1 is probably going to waste.

Also, as mage noted, since this is for a desktop, a drive like the Raptor is going to be *much* better suited for your workload, cheaper, quieter, and cooler.
Click to expand...

Well I often FTP files in excess of 1 gig so an scsi setup would benefit me. And as known the enterprise level drives are much more reliable than consumer level drives.
My purpose isn't primarily gaming although I will be doing some of that too.
 
bartsimsonii said:
I am in the market for a SCSI controller card but its not exactly my area of expertise so i want some input before I pull the trigger.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816118014

EDIT: Another n00b question.
Why does it look like it has 2 pci connectors on it and does it require both of those to be connected?
Click to expand...

That is 64bit/66MHz PCI-X card. As are all these other linked. You need a PCIe SCSI card unless you want to stuff that card into a legacy PCI slot. (32bit/33MHz). The problem is that if you do that, you will lose some performance. Another consideration is that many motherboards won't accomodate a PCI-X card in a PCI slot. Even though the PCI-X cards are backwards compatible, many motherboards have components in front of the PCI slot which will prevent the PCI-X card's extra pins from sitting in front of the slot. Thereby preventing the card from going into the slot all the way.

I have an LSI MegaRAID U320-2 and I've noticed this on many boards while trying to use that card on them.
 
Dan_D said:
That is 64bit/66MHz PCI-X card. As are all these other linked. You need a PCIe SCSI card unless you want to stuff that card into a legacy PCI slot. (32bit/33MHz). The problem is that if you do that, you will lose some performance. Another consideration is that many motherboards won't accomodate a PCI-X card in a PCI slot. Even though the PCI-X cards are backwards compatible, many motherboards have components in front of the PCI slot which will prevent the PCI-X card's extra pins from sitting in front of the slot. Thereby preventing the card from going into the slot all the way.

I have an LSI MegaRAID U320-2 and I've noticed this on many boards while trying to use that card on them.
Click to expand...

Yea I just figured out the diff. between the two a couple days ago.

Seems as if the only PCIe cards are the Intel SRCU42E or the LSI MEGARAID 320-2E Dual Channel Ultral 320 SCSI Controller.
 
bartsimsonii said:
Yea I just figured out the diff. between the two a couple days ago.

Seems as if the only PCIe cards are the Intel SRCU42E or the LSI MEGARAID 320-2E Dual Channel Ultral 320 SCSI Controller.
Click to expand...

I don't know about the Intel card, I've never used it. The LSI MegaRAID U320-2E is expensive as hell, but very nice.
 
bartsimsonii said:
Well I often FTP files in excess of 1 gig so an scsi setup would benefit me. And as known the enterprise level drives are much more reliable than consumer level drives.
Click to expand...
I hope that's over gigabit w/ jumbo frames, with your gigabit NIC on something besides a 32bit/33mhz PCI bus, otherwise, the network connection is going to be your bottleneck. Also, I'm not sure why you think that 15K SCSI would be much different than a couple of large SATA drives in this case. Higher RPM = Lower Latency = Higher performance under multi-user workloads.
As for the reliability, the Raptors, and any of the nearline (WD RE, Seagate SL35) SATA drives have the same MTBF and 5 year warrenty as the top of the line SCSI drives.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
I hope that's over gigabit w/ jumbo frames, with your gigabit NIC on something besides a 32bit/33mhz PCI bus, otherwise, the network connection is going to be your bottleneck. Also, I'm not sure why you think that 15K SCSI would be much different than a couple of large SATA drives in this case. Higher RPM = Lower Latency = Higher performance under multi-user workloads.
As for the reliability, the Raptors, and any of the nearline (WD RE, Seagate SL35) SATA drives have the same MTBF and 5 year warrenty as the top of the line SCSI drives.
Click to expand...

You meantion higher RPM = Lower Latency = Higher performance under multi-user workloads. That's precisely the advantage of 15k SCSI drives. Which are faster than Raptors. This is confusing because your first statement would support a Pro-SCSI recommendation, yet your later statement reflects the contrary.

I agree that SCSI might be overkill in his situation depending on the machines usage, but SCSI is the better performer overall. Additionally, I agree that SATA is usually the way to go because of cost per gigabyte and the warranty on some SATA drives is competetive with SCSI. I do not believe the actual MTBF of most SATA drives, aside from the Raptors are as good as their SCSI counterparts, but I could be wrong. I haven't done any research on the subject.
 
Dan_D said:
You meantion higher RPM = Lower Latency = Higher performance under multi-user workloads. That's precisely the advantage of 15k SCSI drives. Which are faster than Raptors. This is confusing because your first statement would support a Pro-SCSI recommendation, yet your later statement reflects the contrary.
Click to expand...
The key operative words are "multi-user workload". He's not running a database server, he's running a desktop, and has yet to demonstrate or explain how his access patterns will benefit from SCSI.

Dan_D said:
I agree that SCSI might be overkill in his situation depending on the machines usage, but SCSI is the better performer overall. Additionally, I agree that SATA is usually the way to go because of cost per gigabyte and the warranty on some SATA drives is competetive with SCSI. I do not believe the actual MTBF of most SATA drives, aside from the Raptors are as good as their SCSI counterparts, but I could be wrong. I haven't done any research on the subject.
Click to expand...
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_0=309&devID_1=277&devID_2=279&devCnt=3

The two top performing 15K SCSI drives vs the Raptor X. You see the 15K shine under ever increasing queue depth for the servermark benchs. There is more to drive performance than simple RPMs, namely firmware optimization that cannot be captured on a spec sheet.

http://wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=2
http://maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto...XLine+Family/MaXLine+III&productview=Features
http://www.okla.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/seagate_nl35_press.pdf

All of the so-called "enterprise" or "near-line" SATA drives are rated for at least 1 milion hours, the Raptor and RE2 at 1.2 million, at 100% duty-cycle.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
The key operative words are "multi-user workload". He's not running a database server, he's running a desktop, and has yet to demonstrate or explain how his access patterns will benefit from SCSI.
Click to expand...

Fair enough.

Vertigo Acid said:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_0=309&devID_1=277&devID_2=279&devCnt=3

The two top performing 15K SCSI drives vs the Raptor X. You see the 15K shine under ever increasing queue depth for the servermark benchs. There is more to drive performance than simple RPMs, namely firmware optimization that cannot be captured on a spec sheet.
Click to expand...

Agreed, but the 15,000rpm rotational speed is a big part of the equation.

Vertigo Acid said:
http://wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=2
http://maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto...XLine+Family/MaXLine+III&productview=Features
http://www.okla.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/seagate_nl35_press.pdf

All of the so-called "enterprise" or "near-line" SATA drives are rated for at least 1 milion hours, the Raptor and RE2 at 1.2 million, at 100% duty-cycle.
Click to expand...

As I had already indicated, I hadn't actually looked into the MTBF of these drives.
 
HGood points but after doing further research I am deciding to go with an LSI 320-2E PCI-E card and 2-4 fujitsu MAX or MAU drives.
 
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bartsimsonii said:
HGood points but after doing further research I am deciding to go with an LSI 320-2E PCI-E card and 2-4 fujitsu MAX or MAU drives.
Click to expand...

The correct abreviation is PCIe.

If I am not mistaken, the MAX is the newer higher performance drive.

GotNoRice said:
If you're on regular PCI, why not get something like this? http://cgi.ebay.com/Adaptec-29160N-...2QQihZ012QQcategoryZ39969QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It's only u160, but thats not going to matter on 32/33 PCI. The cards have awesome driver support as well.
Click to expand...

Perhaps because the original poster wants a newer PCIe card, and can afford to purchase a better, higher end card. If that is the case, why not?
 
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Vertigo Acid said:
The MAX is an RoHS compliant version of the MAU. Potentially newer firmware, but, for most intents and purposes interchangable.
Click to expand...

Thanks for clearing that up. I wasn't aware of that. I only remembered the Fujitsu MAX was newer than the MAU drives.
 
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