scsi or sata

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i am currently in the process of building a new rig, is there much point of me getting scsi (15k) drives over sata drives (probably raptors).

with scsi drives needing a card for them to work how would i go about installing windows on a new build with scsi drives?

thanks
 
SCSI would be faster than sata but massively more expensive. You would install windows the same on SCSI and SATA, press F6 when prompted by the cd and use a driver disc.
 
If you buy new yes but 2nd SCSI against new sata (Raptors) not much in it - I had a 10K U320 Maxtor drive and it completely murdered my IDE (not hard) and was not that hard to set up just make sure if you can to get a 68pin SCSI drive saves messing about with adaptors.

How a modern 15K compares against a raptor not sure tbh sure the additional rpm will make a difference though.

2nd 73GB U320 are not too bad price wise now.
 
Total and complete waste of money going SCSI these days unless your doing professional work for money and need the extra speed.

Very few people do, and even the ones that think they do, usually don't.

So unless you do video editing for a good few hours a day, or edit massive images, etc then don't even think about it! :)
 
AndyC said:
How a modern 15K compares against a raptor not sure tbh sure the additional rpm will make a difference though.

15K U320 Seagate Cheetahs have a sustained transfer rate of up to 125Mb/s and a seek time of around 2.5-3.5ms. In comparision a new Raptor can get about 80Mb/s transfers and a seek time of about 5ms.
 
i was thinking about getting two drive off of ebay secondhand, and was going to use them with my asus P5WDG2-WS Pro motherboard

could anyone recommend a scsi card, only need to run up to 4 drive but has to be 320 ultra
 
turboshed said:
could anyone recommend a scsi card, only need to run up to 4 drive but has to be 320 ultra

Ultra 320 is a bit of a problem when it comes to cards, I don't know of any plain PCI ones only PCI-X or PCI-e and the latter are a) hard to find and b) expensive. The card that everyone seems to be going for is a Megaraid one which ships with some Dell servers, auctions are the source but there are issues with cards coming without backup batteries and RAM modules. Not sure if this only causes a problem with RAID5 or if it affects all operations.

4 drives isn't an issue - the minimum any U320 card will support is 15.
 
the motherboard i have has 2 pci-x slots, does that give me any more options or is it best to go with the dell option?

i did read about people taking apart the cards and selling the battery and memory
 
If you've got PCI-X then your laughing. Personally I'd be looking at an Adaptec card but that's just preference, I've used them in the past and they've always worked without any hassle.

EDIT: Just had a look at the specs of that board - I want one!!!!
 
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yer the board has a very good spec list, i picked my up off my friend for £120 as he was planning on building a new rig but he is going to make do with his for the time being

i'm not really up to scratch with scsi cards, would £150 budget for a card be enough or is that too little?
 
I'm a bit rusty on SCSI cards myself these days, I used to have to spec these sorts of things in work but these days I just ask for a big chunk of the SAN :cool:

£150 is maybe a bit tight for a new Adaptec card, they seem to be between £150 and £200 ex vat. I'd think that you should be able to pick up a second hand one OK for less than £150 all in.
 
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