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SCSI or SATA?

L

L33T

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 14, 2004
Messages
364
I'm looking to upgrade my system:

Abit IC7 Max3
P4 3.0C @ 4.0GHz
Radeon 9700 Pro @ > 9800 spds
DVD-RW DL
CD-RW
Antec TrueBlue 480W PSU
WD 120GB HDD (IDE) for storage of files
Removable (External) USB2.0/FIREWIRE WD 250GB HDD (IDE) for mobile storage of files

Now I'm just missing a harddisk for WinXP. As you may know, the motherboard has the onboard capacity to run SATA RAID 0+1.

I'm trying to decide between buying a SCSI Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 (18GB) or a SATA WD Raptor 10K (36GB). I understand that buying a SCSI system will mean that I'll also need a SCSI adaptor, and while I'm unwilling to spend the huge sum of money, I am willing to look around on the forums to find an adaptor.

My question basically is, which should I go for?

I'm not looking to spend that much money on this; for the SATA, I'm thinking I can strike a bargain at ~$75, high maybe $80. For the SCSI, I think I saw a bargain at a similar price, with an adaptor priced at $20.

I must admit that I'm not familiar with either system, so I don't know which is faster. However, I would like to get the faster system: the HDD would be used only to run WinXP. (Which brings up a note: I guess I'll need another regular IDE HDD to run the programs/software).

Please make any suggestions and provide any helpful comments you guys can. Thanks!

- Jason
 
a $20 dollars scsi adapter will offer you no more performance than a sata drive really. I would recommend going sata to start, though, don't start with the 36 gig raptor, get the 74, it's had several upgrade to it since the 36 and is significantly faster and quieter.
 
As far as the SCSI goes, one 15k drive on an 80MB/s (cheap) controller should be faster than the Raptor unless you've got bottlenecks. If there aren't any other bandwidth hungry devices on the PCI bus (gigabit ether, video card, TV card, etc.) that is. If you add a second SCSI drive you'll end up with a bottleneck on a 32-bit PCI bus regardless of what controller you use. Of course, you'll have the exact same problem running SATA or PATA drives off of an add-in card as well.
On a single CPU board w/o PCI-X or PCI-e slots & controller I'd get a 74GB Raptor.
 
I might get PCI express in the future though. As for the PCI bus: while the PCI bus itself isn't really technically "consumed" per-se, the AGP-8x is occupied by a heavy hitter gfx card. Also, there is Gigabit lan onboard (which is its own chip...so it frees up the PCI bus there). I think the adaptor would be a 160Mb/s (???) though I'm not really sure, or familiar with this.
 
I do not see any reason to go SCSI over SATA. You do not have to buy the adapter and the SATA drives are bigger and cheaper. Save your money and go with the Raptor 74GB it will be fast enough for your needs.

I used to love my SCSI back in the days of only two IDE channels on a MB.
 
I'm going to be posting those message for a long time to come, but anybody who suggests SCSI to a gamer needs to go to Storagereview.com and chek out their Leaderboard and review of the WD740GD. According to StorageReview, WD740GD is the fastest hard drive for single user loads "regardless of spindle speed, interface or price" -
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200401/20040126WD740GD_8.html Yes, that means it beats 15,000 RPM Maxtor Atlas 15K II. Yes that means it costs less AND performs better than comparable 10,000 RPM offerings from Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, and Fujitsu. And the cost bonus doesn't even include not having to buy a SCSI host bus adapter and cables - you get SATA for free on any worthy entusiast board today.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200401/20040126WD740GD_3.html shows the Raptor trashing every other 10,000 RPM drive available and trading blows with 15K units.

Now, if you are going to be running a web server/database/forums etc, and are going to have hordes of users looking at data all over the disk simultaneously, then you need to look at SCSI - but you're not going to have a lot of luck running a server on an IC7 anyway. If you're the only user making requests of the drive, stick with SATA. Also, for a high capacity and high performance solution, check out Maxtor MaxLine III 16MB, SR's overall desktop leader at present.
 
i did not read all of the posts on this thread but.....

15k!!!!!!! go for it, and while your at it get 2 and run them in raid.

ok ok, just go with the scsi, my vote.
 
DougLite said:
I'm going to be posting those message for a long time to come, but anybody who suggests SCSI to a gamer needs to go to Storagereview.com and chek out their Leaderboard and review of the WD740GD. According to StorageReview, WD740GD is the fastest hard drive for single user loads "regardless of spindle speed, interface or price" -
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200401/20040126WD740GD_8.html Yes, that means it beats 15,000 RPM Maxtor Atlas 15K II. Yes that means it costs less AND performs better than comparable 10,000 RPM offerings from Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, and Fujitsu. And the cost bonus doesn't even include not having to buy a SCSI host bus adapter and cables - you get SATA for free on any worthy entusiast board today.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200401/20040126WD740GD_3.html shows the Raptor trashing every other 10,000 RPM drive available and trading blows with 15K units.
Click to expand...

While I agree that the Raptor is a fast drive it bothers me to see posts like this claiming it's the fastest drive out there for single-user situations. Take a look at StorageReview's performance database and see how the Raptor compares to some of the latest 15k drives. If you sort the database by the gaming benchmark you will see that 6 drives ahead of the Raptor, one of which is a 10k model. If you look at the other single-user tests you will see that there are 4-5 other 15k SCSI drives that perform better than the Raptor there as well. The Raptor is an excellent choice for desktop use but is certainly not the fastest drive out there by far. The line that you are quoting was true when the review was posted over a year ago, not anymore.
 
I recently went the SCSI route and all in all it cost me $184. I'm going to update the thread I posted on here as soon as I put all my stuff together. I got all my parts off of eBay BTW. I can't say whether you should use SCSI just yet since I haven't tried installed it yet, but I'm sure I won't have any regrets about this especially since I'm upgrading from a 7200 rpm hard drive.
 
aug1516 said:
While I agree that the Raptor is a fast drive it bothers me to see posts like this claiming it's the fastest drive out there for single-user situations. Take a look at StorageReview's performance database and see how the Raptor compares to some of the latest 15k drives. If you sort the database by the gaming benchmark you will see that 6 drives ahead of the Raptor, one of which is a 10k model. If you look at the other single-user tests you will see that there are 4-5 other 15k SCSI drives that perform better than the Raptor there as well. The Raptor is an excellent choice for desktop use but is certainly not the fastest drive out there by far. The line that you are quoting was true when the review was posted over a year ago, not anymore.
Click to expand...

Yes, Maxtor Atlas 15KII/10KV, and Fujitsu MAU series drives are faster than Raptor - but not on a 133MB/s PCI SCSI HBA vs SATA channels hooked directly into the southbridge. Raptor will also run significantly cooler and quieter than either of these 15K offerings. The fact that it is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than its SCSI competiton makes the decision even easier. - I've posted in another thread about being able to acquire a WD740GD and Maxtor DiamondMax 10/MaxLine III for the price of one Fujitsu MAU 73GB 15K drive. I couldn't even find Atlas 15KII at Newegg, Zipzoomfly, or Hypermicro. Raptor converges performance, reliability, value, and ease of integration like no SCSI drive can. SATA II is backwards compatible with SATA I, and looks to be the evolutionary storage interface standard in desktops for some time to come.
 
A good 15K SCSI drive offers nearly double the performance of an equivalent sized 7,200 rpm drive. If you want to pay way more money for a mear 2,800 rpm increase then go for it. :p
 
I want the ultimate performance here. We're talking about striving for instanteous loadup--the decrease in time required, as much as possible. If that means we can only get a smaller drive, then so be it. I'm not quite so sure I'd need a 74gb drive to run winxp & software anyway, although if the need were to arise, I suppose I'd solve that problem when it does.
 
I hate to say it but your desire for nearly instantaneous load-up times is not going to be met by either SCSI or SATA. If you're thinking about OS boot, then the only thing you can do from a practical standpoint is suspend your system instead of shutting it down. If you're talking about game load times then you'll be surprised to learn that the CPU is often the bottleneck for long load times, not the disk. I know that's counterintuitive.

SCSI on a budget is an oyxmoron. I'd stick with SATA so long as you've got NCQ support.
 
DougLite said:
Yes, Maxtor Atlas 15KII/10KV, and Fujitsu MAU series drives are faster than Raptor - but not on a 133MB/s PCI SCSI HBA vs SATA channels hooked directly into the southbridge. Raptor will also run significantly cooler and quieter than either of these 15K offerings. The fact that it is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than its SCSI competiton makes the decision even easier. - I've posted in another thread about being able to acquire a WD740GD and Maxtor DiamondMax 10/MaxLine III for the price of one Fujitsu MAU 73GB 15K drive. I couldn't even find Atlas 15KII at Newegg, Zipzoomfly, or Hypermicro. Raptor converges performance, reliability, value, and ease of integration like no SCSI drive can. SATA II is backwards compatible with SATA I, and looks to be the evolutionary storage interface standard in desktops for some time to come.
Click to expand...

The Raptor drives cannot even come close to saturating the bandwidth of the PCI bus so I'm not really sure why you think that would suddenly make the Raptor that much faster than the 15k SCSI drives. Neither a Raptor drive or any of the SCSI drives I mentioned are being held back by the bandwidth limitations of a standard PCI bus. So the SCSI drives I mentioned would still outperform the Raptor even if they were connected to dedicated SATA channels on a motherboard, SATAI or II. Your other points about SATA are accurate however and I agree with you 100%. The Raptor drive is cheaper, will run cooler, will be quieter and is more available than some of the newer 15k drives. However it does not have any advantage when it comes to performance. If someone wants the best performance and is willing to pay for it then SCSI is still the way to go, single-user desktop use included.
 
L33T said:
I want the ultimate performance here. We're talking about striving for instanteous loadup--the decrease in time required, as much as possible. If that means we can only get a smaller drive, then so be it. I'm not quite so sure I'd need a 74gb drive to run winxp & software anyway, although if the need were to arise, I suppose I'd solve that problem when it does.
Click to expand...

The boot-up time of your system is in no way related to the performance of that system. SCSI cards or onboard SATA controllers will actually make it take longer for your computer to boot, especially the SCSI controllers. Forget about boot-up time, it's pointless unless you spend all your time rebooting your computer.
 
aug1516 said:
The boot-up time of your system is in no way related to the performance of that system. SCSI cards or onboard SATA controllers will actually make it take longer for your computer to boot, especially the SCSI controllers. Forget about boot-up time, it's pointless unless you spend all your time rebooting your computer.
Click to expand...

Exactly right. Boot up time on a scsi controller especially will do nothing but pi$$ you off. Besides, there are numerous ways to decrease cold boot times, scsi or sata. Boot up times should really be the least of your concerns, as a power user anyway...I would think?
 
aug1516 said:
The Raptor drives cannot even come close to saturating the bandwidth of the PCI bus so I'm not really sure why you think that would suddenly make the Raptor that much faster than the 15k SCSI drives. Neither a Raptor drive or any of the SCSI drives I mentioned are being held back by the bandwidth limitations of a standard PCI bus. So the SCSI drives I mentioned would still outperform the Raptor even if they were connected to dedicated SATA channels on a motherboard, SATAI or II. Your other points about SATA are accurate however and I agree with you 100%. The Raptor drive is cheaper, will run cooler, will be quieter and is more available than some of the newer 15k drives. However it does not have any advantage when it comes to performance. If someone wants the best performance and is willing to pay for it then SCSI is still the way to go, single-user desktop use included.
Click to expand...

No, but two of the latest 15K drives can saturate the 32 bit legacy PCI bus - Atlas 15K II's _minimum_ transfer rate is 74.4. MB/sec - two of those equals 148.8 MB/sec, far above the 133 MB/sec of the PCI bus. That's assumming nothing else is using that bus - network, sound, etc are all going to take away from that. He doesn't have the option of a PCI-X or PCI Express HBA on an Abit IC-7. In this case, the point to point 1.5 Gbps for each SATA port directly into the ICH5R southbridge wins by a long way. L33T's PCI bandwidth will be available for other tasks, and he won't have to invest in a paralell SCSI susbsystem that's about to get replaced by Serially Attached SCSI. He also won't have to buy a U320 cable (they are expensive), learn about termination, etc.
 
DougLite said:
No, but two of the latest 15K drives can saturate the 32 bit legacy PCI bus - Atlas 15K II's _minimum_ transfer rate is 74.4. MB/sec - two of those equals 148.8 MB/sec, far above the 133 MB/sec of the PCI bus. That's assumming nothing else is using that bus - network, sound, etc are all going to take away from that. He doesn't have the option of a PCI-X or PCI Express HBA on an Abit IC-7. In this case, the point to point 1.5 Gbps for each SATA port directly into the ICH5R southbridge wins by a long way. L33T's PCI bandwidth will be available for other tasks, and he won't have to invest in a paralell SCSI susbsystem that's about to get replaced by Serially Attached SCSI. He also won't have to buy a U320 cable (they are expensive), learn about termination, etc.
Click to expand...

A couple of flaws in that thinking though. First one, even if two or more of these SCSI drives could saturate the bandwidth of the PCI bus it would probably NEVER happen in real life usage. It's not often that one drive runs at it's peak transfer rate much less two drives at the exact same time. Second thing, actual burst transfer rate of the drive has little to do with real world performance. Any respectable hard drive review site will run numerous bechmarks in an attempt to simulate real world usage. In fact, there are many examples of drives that do well in the low-level tests (burst transfer rate) then fall behind when it comes to real world usage. You will find that things like seek time and firmware optimizations do much more for real-world performance than and burst transfer rate does. Finally, most people that are going with SCSI setups are only purchasing 1, maybe 2 of these drives. When you start adding more of these high performance hard drives it may be time to look at Raid solutions which then take you to PCI-X or PCI-E. In this case, it sounds like 1 SCSI hard drive will be enough.
 
L33T, I have been so busy debating the merits of SCSI over SATA with DougLite that I completly missed something in your original post. The Cheetah 15k.3 drive was fast in it's day but cannot compete with the Raptor 74gb drive as far as desktop performance goes. If you are going to go SCSI then you need something like the Fujitsu MAS or MAU series or the Maxtor Atlas 15k or 15kII.
 
DougLite said:
I'm going to be posting those message for a long time to come, but anybody who suggests SCSI to a gamer needs to go to Storagereview.com and chek out their Leaderboard and review of the WD740GD. According to StorageReview, WD740GD is the fastest hard drive for single user loads "regardless of spindle speed, interface or price" -
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200401/20040126WD740GD_8.html Yes, that means it beats 15,000 RPM Maxtor Atlas 15K II. Yes that means it costs less AND performs better than comparable 10,000 RPM offerings from Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, and Fujitsu. And the cost bonus doesn't even include not having to buy a SCSI host bus adapter and cables - you get SATA for free on any worthy entusiast board today.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200401/20040126WD740GD_3.html shows the Raptor trashing every other 10,000 RPM drive available and trading blows with 15K units.

Now, if you are going to be running a web server/database/forums etc, and are going to have hordes of users looking at data all over the disk simultaneously, then you need to look at SCSI - but you're not going to have a lot of luck running a server on an IC7 anyway. If you're the only user making requests of the drive, stick with SATA. Also, for a high capacity and high performance solution, check out Maxtor MaxLine III 16MB, SR's overall desktop leader at present.
Click to expand...

Well put. I agree 100%.
 
aug1516 said:
L33T, I have been so busy debating the merits of SCSI over SATA with DougLite that I completly missed something in your original post. The Cheetah 15k.3 drive was fast in it's day but cannot compete with the Raptor 74gb drive as far as desktop performance goes. If you are going to go SCSI then you need something like the Fujitsu MAS or MAU series or the Maxtor Atlas 15k or 15kII.
Click to expand...

As I suggested: "Yes, Maxtor Atlas 15KII/10KV, and Fujitsu MAU series drives are faster than Raptor." Seagate has kind of lost their way in terms of raw performance, although they do make the quietest and coolest running 15K drives.

And while it's true that bus saturation will not be a chronic problem, it will be a problem that will rear its head in certain situations. Does this particular mobo have the LAN connected over the CSA bus, or is it a 32-bit PCI NIC? If he's running PCI GbE, then bus saturation will be a problem in a lot of heavy transfer situations.

And SR does do real world benchmarks - you are free to look at all of the results in their performance database on their Office, High End, Gaming, and Bootup Drivemarks, as well as their Database and Web Server tests. Their Testbed 3 has been a constant testing platform from the heydey of Fujitsu MAP/MAS in 2003 all the way to the introduction of Atlas 15KII in 2005.

Aug1516, I respect what you have brought to this discussion, and I believe we can agree, that in terms of raw pefromance, L33T's going to be best off with Atlas 15K, followed by Fujitsu MAS/MAU, then Raptor, and that either of the 15K SCSI offerings will be in the neighborhood of 10-20% faster, depending on the particular task. You know what, I think it's kind of like comparing an FX-55 to a 3800+ - Diminishing returns on a much larger investment, but the best is still the best.

I made some statements earlier in the thread that current facts/data do not backup. But I do firmly believe, and the numbers back me up here, that Raptor is the best VALUE in high performance hard drives for single user systems, and that the additional investment in 15K SCSI is only warranted for users that want the ABSOLUTE best and are willing to pay appropriately for it, like people who buy an FX-55. That's really my main point.
 
And for the Maxtor Atlas 15KII/10KV, and Fujitsu MAU, I guess it'd cost much more than the Seagate Cheetah 15k3?
 
DougLite said:
Does this particular mobo have the LAN connected over the CSA bus, or is it a 32-bit PCI NIC?
Click to expand...
Yes, this motherboard has CSA connected gigabit.

DougLite said:
Aug1516, I respect what you have brought to this discussion, and I believe we can agree, that in terms of raw pefromance, L33T's going to be best off with Atlas 15K, followed by Fujitsu MAS/MAU, then Raptor, and that either of the 15K SCSI offerings will be in the neighborhood of 10-20% faster, depending on the particular task. You know what, I think it's kind of like comparing an FX-55 to a 3800+ - Diminishing returns on a much larger investment, but the best is still the best.

I made some statements earlier in the thread that current facts/data do not backup. But I do firmly believe, and the numbers back me up here, that Raptor is the best VALUE in high performance hard drives for single user systems, and that the additional investment in 15K SCSI is only warranted for users that want the ABSOLUTE best and are willing to pay appropriately for it, like people who buy an FX-55. That's really my main point.
Click to expand...

Your point is well made and your comparison quite accurate. While the faster 15k drives may provide a little more performance the best value is certainly with the Raptor.
 
mikeblas said:
Why not?

.B ekiM
Click to expand...

Well, let's see here. I can think of two very good reasons. Lack of an enterprise level storage subsystem and extremely limited expansion bus bandwidth are the two main reasons why. Another GbE connection and about 4 quality SCSI HDDs would saturate the PCI bus real quick.

Low end yes, but it's not going to scale well at all under any sort of large multi user load, which is my definition of a server workload.
 
DougLite said:
Lack of an enterprise level storage subsystem
Click to expand...

That there's no on-board SCSI, you mean?

DougLite said:
and extremely limited expansion bus bandwidth are the two main reasons why. Another GbE connection and about 4 quality SCSI HDDs would saturate the PCI bus real quick.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. That no good server-class machine uses PCI for its expansion bus?

.B ekiM
 
Rather than debate bandwidth saturation and benchmarks, I can offer some comments about the subjective "feel" between the SCSI and SATA alternative. I ran nothing but SCSI from 1989 until last fall. In later years I ran my drives in a CRU four drawer LVD external case so the heat wouldn't impact the rest of my computer parts and so I could place the noise source farther from where I set. I had 12 drives in hotswap drawers that I was able to swap in and out of the system depending on the projects I was working on. This was necessary because affordable SCSI drive capacity always lags considerably. You can buy a 300GB SCSI drive, but it will cost you $1500. But I digress...

The reason I stuck with SCSI until recently had to do with multi-tasking and what happened with I would do a refresh on my SQL database, or when doing housekeeping operations like duplicate scanning or search and replace. When I hit my SCSI array hard it just chattered away and chewed through the work. When I tried ATA and did the same work when I hit the drives hard the system basically came to a halt like it had been kicked in the gut, then gradually recovered. Subjectively, the difference was night and day.

With the advent of the Raptor 74 and the new NCQ native SATA drives a lot has changed. I can now do a database refresh while running other operations without bringing my system to a halt. Large programs load quickly, and work with a lot of writes respond well. It's not quite the same feel as with the SCSI subsystem, but it doesn't make any perceptible noise and doesn't require it's own 200W power supply either. Subjectively, there is a difference in system response, but it's one that I can happily live with in return for the quiet, lower price and larger capacities, capacity being a big deal with my work.

You mention boot time, and since the SCSI host adapter has to do a bus device scan and load the driver and it will slow your boot time. The heat dissipation will be considerably higher than an SATA drive, as will the power draw. So will the noise. Those fast access times mean abrupt position change for the read head without the cushioning of the more gentle accel/decel curves of SATA drives. I grew used to the sound of my SCSI array, but I'm not in denial about the noise. The newer SCSI 15K drives are much better than say the 1st gen 10K drives were, but anyone that tells you that you won't hear them is having some fun with you. SCSI also has command overhead that takes away a bit of it's potential speed, but the fastest drives are still faster thant he fastest SATA drives both on paper and subjectively to the user.

Where you will see the biggest advantage out of SCSI is when reading or writing a lot of smaller files. The advantage in this type of operation will be substantial. Where you will see the least advantage is on large file trasfers. The areal density of the best SATA drives somewhat makes up for their slower rotation. This is and large/smart caching is why you see the Maxtor Diamondmax 10 300GB offering competition to the Raptor on large file transfers. In SCSI's favor, you will not see nearly the number of drive failures as with SATA drives. They do fail eventually, as anyone in a large IT house or server farm can tell you, but only after long periods of being run constantly 24/7 in most cases.

If you want SCSI just for the novelty and amusement value, and you don't care about the downsides, then by all means go for it. For me, it no longer makes practical sense. There are times when I almost miss the additional system complexity, termination issues and the chattering of the drives... almost. ;)

oc
 
The IC7-G has no onboard SCSI but I don't even know why we are even discussing that. I don't see where in the original post did it say that this system was going to be used as a multi-user file server. L33T was just asking a question about upgrading and was wondering how SATA would compare to a SCSI setup.
 
Excellent post oddlycalm, a good look at SCSI compared to today's SATA hard drive tech :)
 
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