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SCSI Questions, Please Help!

K

<K2> Zeppelin159

n00b
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Jan 29, 2004
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I have just got 2 36.9GB IBM Ultrastar SCSI U160 7200rpm drives for free and also a adaptec 29160 card. It came with the cabling that is needed I think, but my question is will the adaptec do SCSI RAID? And also will these 2 scsi's outperform my 120GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive? Is it really worth it to use these scsi's or should I just sell them all? What I was wanting to do is put both in raid and use them for windows xp and all my programs and games and such. I would use my other ide drive for storage and sell my sata drive. I really don't know anything about scsi except for what I have been finding on the internet which is all spanish to me. Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)
 
Unfortunately, the 29160 is not a RAID controller. Those drivers, being 7200RPM will likely underperform the current drive you have. One of the main advantages to SCSI is high rotational speed which provides lower seek-times. With 7200RPM drivers, I doubt you will see an improvement, however those drives are still solid, scsi drives are built to handle a lot.. you could always sell the 29160 on ebay and grab yourself a RAID compatible card.. OR sell the whole kaboodle and get yourself a raptor... I really can't say those would outperform your current drive setup however.

Have a good one,

Dave
 
<K2> Zeppelin159 said:
These are the drives http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/ultra/ul36lp.htm

The seek time is faster than my 8.5 with the sata I have. Also the seagate sata has 8mb cache and the scsi's have 2mb i believe. Would the sata be better still? If I buy a raid controller will these scsi's be faster than 1 74gb raptor?
Click to expand...

They do have a good seek time compared to a 7200 rpm IDE drive, but they don't have nearly the transfer rate. Striping them will increase thier effective access time, and with those drives the striped transfer rate will barely keep up to a current generation 7200 rpm IDE disk. A single Raptor will smoke them.
Still, it's 73GB of disk space. Might as well use them as long as you've got the open slot & drive bays and have a use for the space. I wouldn't put any cash into them though, so don't buy a Raid controller unless you want to get more SCSI stuff. Some of the "regular" SCSI controllers can do 0 and 1 now. I just got a dual channel (I've got SCSI opticals) LSI Logic controller for $140 from newegg a month or so ago with this feature.
If you'd still like to stripe them to make a larger volume give the built in Windows software striping a try. I've used it before, and it doesn't seem to put a significant load on the cpu.
Selling them, of course, is another good option. I wouldn't personally, but I don't have an SATA controller, I'm out of slots, and I've got plenty of SCSI equipped machines I could stick them in. In your case, I think you'd be happier with a Raptor.
 
They do have a good seek time compared to a 7200 rpm IDE drive, but they don't have nearly the transfer rate.

I thought that scsi was u160 meaning 160gb/sec or something like that? My sata is 150gb/sec. Isn't 160 better?

and with those drives the striped transfer rate will barely keep up to a current generation 7200 rpm IDE disk.

Is that really true? That sucks if it is.
 
Ultra 160 has a theoretical max throughput of 160MB/s. SATA has a theoretical max throughput of 150MB/s. That being said, drives today don't reach those goals. Perhaps one day in the future we will drives that can transfer at those rates, but not at the moment. So what you are talking about is what the bus can attain, not what the drives themselves can actually do. And, to cap it all off, if you put your U160 card in a PCI slot, you are still limited to 133MB/s because that's what the PCI bus is limited to. Fun, no?

And you are correct about the older SCSI not keeping up with current hardware. In my first machine, I had a 10K Cheetah. Nice drive, all kinds of loud. Two or so years later I added in a 10GB Maxtor that smoked the Cheetah i every way despite being much less expensive, a way lower in rotaional speed. The drive throughput was something like 3 times higher than the Cheetah. As the years progress, companies increase the speed of their HDD's through hardware, algorithims, cache, etc. that have nothing to do with rotation speed.

That being said, SCSI drives are usually built for server and are usually more optimized for that environment. They are also built to be rock solid performers because of the reliability needed in the server environment.

73GB is 73GB of storage... but I think a Raptor would smoke 'em both.

Cheers.
 
Use those old SCSI drives as reliable storage. Their performance will be better than ATA drives of their vintage, that's typically the way it goes.

If you had the U160 card in a high-speed PCI or PCI-X bus (either 64-bit, 66 or higher MHz, or any combination of both), then it would take several drives working at once to saturate an U160 bus. As for the ATA side of things, only one drive can be transferring at a time on a channel, and no ATA drives can transmit at 150, 133, or even 100MB/s. Best is maybe 60-70 on the burst.
 
I'd like to add that even if you're on a 64bit BUS, most U160 drives(10 or 15K) are rated at around 40-80mb/s average(external rate)... All my U160 Atlas drives are rated at 45mb/s average by Maxtor(who consumed Quantum)..

Ben
 
Thanks for all the replies guys. I hooked both of them up in my current system and I am using them for storage now. I ran a sandra hd bench with them and they are waayy slower than my 120gb seagate sata drive. The scsi got 29mb/s transfer and the seagate gets 50mb/s transfer according to sandra. Anyway thanks again to all that replied :)
 
You should DEFINITELY be getting better than that on those drives. You sure you got the termination right?
 
sm8000 said:
You should DEFINITELY be getting better than that on those drives. You sure you got the termination right?
Click to expand...

Actually, according the the specs (see link from original poster), that transfer rate is about right. This is a 4yo model we're talking about here.
 
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