Scsi controller card with cache

[mobiux]

Will there be much of a perfomance difference going from a scsi card with no cache to one with 64 mb?
Logically one would say yes, but in the environment I have it's not real heavy usage.
I stream music to maybe 4 computers at once, and serve files to about the same.

Is the cache useful in a lower use setup?

 

[DougLite]

It will be 'faster' but definitely not worth the extra expense.

 

[LoneWolf]

Unless you can pull one off Ebay for cheap, I wouldn't bother. Better to look for speedy drives than a caching controller unless you have a need for heavy sustained throughput.

 

[tdg]

In your setup the cache probably wouldn't be used. The controller cache only helps out if there are multiple requests for the same data thats currently cached. With streaming and normal file serving it wouldn't be of use.

 

[Zepher]

how much data is being transferred while streaming? If it isn't that much data, you probably won't even see the difference.
I serve movies from my main editing machine and I was just doing some tests one night and had all 8 machines playing the same movie at different parts from the server and then played 8 different movies from the same drive and then 8 different movies from 3 different drives all from regular 7200rpm IDE drives. Not one stutter and each machine could jump around the movies as if the file was on the local drive. The server/editing mahines was one of the 8 machines playing a movie as well and it's only a P3 733.
these are divx files, btw.