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Which SCSI drive?

B

bandit390

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 27, 2004
Messages
1,374
I started with 2 raptors in raid. I sold those and now have a maxtor III 16mb as my boot drive. Well it isnt the kind of speed I thought it would be and I really don't feel like going back to raptors. So I want to try SCSI. But which drive should I get and what else will I need to hook it up?

I have this MB
http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Products/Products_GA-K8NSNXP-939.htm

Segate
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101514

Htachi
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100557-1

Maxtor
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100780-1

Fujitsu
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100099-1
 
One, you need a scsi controller before you get a scsi drive.

Personally I'd get the fujitsu or the seagate for scsi drives. Really though, when it comes down to it, scsi is the semi of harddrives, hard working, long lasting and reliable. I've got old 540 meg scsi drives that were abused to hell before i got them and they still run.

Just make sure you keep those 15k drives cool, like, close to room temp as possible.
 
In terms of performance with the drives, you listed, there is Maxtor, Fujitsu, and everyone else. Maxtor takes SR's Office DriveMark, Fujitsu takes all of the other desktop DriveMarks. Maxtor is king of the server hill though. Nobody else is within 10% of those drives in desktop performance. The Hitachi 15K drive is _really_ far behind the others - it even lags current 10K drives. I left it out of this comparison to make room for WD740GD as a known quantity baseline to compare too.

The Fujitsu drive is the cheapest and fastest. They all ship with 5 year warranties and come from reputable enterprise lines. Anybody who makes statements about one of these lines being more reliable than the other has been overly influenced by a handful of bad experiences. I cannot comment on drive noise as I do not own any of them. As mentioned earlier, 15K drives have cooling requirements that must not be ignored.

Definitely avoid the Hitachi, it is nowhere close to meeting your performance requirements. I'm really liking the Fujitsu for you. Don't expect any miracles from RAID-0, don't expect to get better bang for the buck than the Raptors, and hang on to your MaxLine III for your media storage needs.

You will need a SCSI HBA that supports 5V signalling in a 32bit PCI slot. Also, you will be capped at 133MB/sec of 32bit PCI, meaning you will never realize actual throughput much above 120MB/sec, and that is presuming that nothing else is using the bus. Unless you just have money to burn, SCSI is a huge investment for simply "wanting to try" particularly if you need any amount of capacity. Nevertheless, if you get it going, it will blow away the Raptors you had.
 
For a small setup like this, might I recommend LSI's LSIU160 single channel U160 HBA? The price is pretty unbeatable for your purpose
 
As for cooling, my room stays close to room temperature and there will be a 120 fan blowing on it. If they require more than that, i'll stay with sata.

Vertigo Acid said:
For a small setup like this, might I recommend LSI's LSIU160 single channel U160 HBA? The price is pretty unbeatable for your purpose
Click to expand...

Knowing it won't be able to go over 133, would a 160 card have any downsides to a 320?

So im just looking at the controller, cable and thats it?
 
I would probably go with the Seagate SCSIs just because of their track record and reputation. I've owned quite a few, around 10-ish Cheetahs, give or take 1 or 2, and so far none of them has failed even under extreme heat. By extreme heat, I mean it, my room was a furnance compared to the rest of the house in the summer - the drives were sizzling hot to the touch! Heh, that was back in the day when I didn't have any fans in my case, besides the processor and power supply.

Besides, just about every server computer I have are using Seagate drives, both SCA and Ultra, as OEM - Sun, HP, Compaq, etc.

Try Ebay or something for a controller, cause most of them are quite expensive new. However, I admit that I haven't looked at their pricing in a long time, so I'm out of date by about 5 years.
 
Nope, none that I know of or experienced before I made the jump back from SCSI with my current SATA setup. As for Seagate, right now they really are lagging in the SCSI department compared to Maxtor and Fujitsu. I'm a big Fujitsu fan, as they are both affordable and in many cases the fastest around. Also, they tend to run quieter and cooler than Maxtor.
 
Most likely I will go with fujitsu. I was looking at segate, but they are overpriced vs fujitsu.

But since 2x 36 drives is actually cheaper than 1x 74 gb drive. It seems better to get 2x 36gb drives and set up for raid.
 
bandit390 said:
As for cooling, my room stays close to room temperature and there will be a 120 fan blowing on it. If they require more than that, i'll stay with sata.



Knowing it won't be able to go over 133, would a 160 card have any downsides to a 320?

So im just looking at the controller, cable and thats it?
Click to expand...

No real disadvantages of an U160 card vs U320 card in this sort of setup. The single channel LSI that has already been recommended is an excellent choice IMO.
 
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