Author Topic: SCSI or ATA (Read 7870 times)

Morpheus · « **on:** August 05, 2002, 09:08:26 AM »

For gaming, which is better, which is faster, what about RAID if RAID what level?

ZWarrior · « **Reply #1 on:** August 05, 2002, 11:06:44 AM »

That is a tough decision. Before the advent of 10,000RPM IDE Drives, I would have sworn that IDE was slower than SCSI. Now, it's a lot more difficult to say that. Overall, SCSI has a higher throughput, simply because it has a wide bus, but the drives are getting to be about equal in seek and transfer times.

RAID may not be all it's cut out to be when it comes to things like games. You have a lot of overhead when you go RAID. Plus all the heat that it creates. And then you have the cost of the RAID controller, and drives.

n1c · « **Reply #2 on:** August 05, 2002, 06:39:20 PM »

RAID is cool to mess around with and RAID 0 is the fastest and cheapest but its realy not nessesary (Also there is no "Backup" for lost info) so I wouldent worry too much about it...

RAID 0 = splits the data blocks 50/50
i.e.
HD1 - HD2
BlockA - BlockB
BlockC - BlockD....

RAID 1 = Copy of HD1 wich means 100% redundency

RAID 2 through RAID 5 i dont recomend for home use (plus you need 4 HD)

[Edited on 8-6-2002 by Dragon Master]

opiesilver · « **Reply #3 on:** August 05, 2002, 11:31:14 PM »

Ok, out of the way amateurs, BSEFH coming through.

RAID 0 is fastest. However, if one drive fails in the LUN, it's all over. All data is corrupted. It's also the least expensive, dollars for megabytes, of the different types.

On the question of SCSI or IDE, go IDE for home use. The data through put 7200 rpm drives with an 8 megabyte cache is just as fast as any 10K rpm SCSI drive. For business use go SCSI with 15K rpm drives for high access databases or work stations.

Got any more questions? I'm not afraid to get geeky with you.
:hat:

n1c · « **Reply #4 on:** August 06, 2002, 02:27:13 AM »

ok i edited my post and explained myself better

ZWarrior · « **Reply #5 on:** August 06, 2002, 09:44:31 AM »

Actually Op, RAID5 is the fastest, based on the fact that seek times are now splits across the mulitple drives, and RAID0 is single drive dependent. But then that also depends on the application you are using the RAID for. I would agree that RAID0 for database access is best, as there is the striping.
Mirroring is... OK, but for reliability always go for RAID5 w/ striping.

Morpheus · « **Reply #6 on:** August 06, 2002, 10:36:50 AM »

Opie, I love when you get geeky you BSEFH!

So I have loads of money, and want the fastest possible machine, and I don't care about data redundancy because all I do is play games on my machine, and like Rogue I reload several times a year. So I would want RAID 0 cause it's the fastest, right? Now could I do RAID w/ SCSI and would that be faster still, or would RAID with ATA 133 be the fastest?

Another sort of RAID question. If I have a RAID board 2 HD a DVD and a CDWR could I put them all on seperate IDE ports and they would all be "Masters"?

Morpheus · « **Reply #7 on:** August 06, 2002, 10:40:21 AM »

Oh I'm just full of questions today. My last post made me think of something else.

If the setup is RAID 0 with 2 HD's and I wanted to create a backup image so I could reload the way Rogue does, would I do 2 images? One of each HD or would it be one image? I'm assuming that with a RAID setup even though you may have 2 HD's you would see one C partition that is split between the 2 drives.

Well, that should get you BSEFH's and BOFH's and PFY's and OFG and CG's all something to post to.

opiesilver · « **Reply #8 on:** August 06, 2002, 02:00:19 PM »

I'm not sure, but I think your assuming only two drive for raid 0 in the quoted post. If you were to match the number of drives with your raid 5 config, raid 0 would still be faster. It doesn't have the parity to deal with. The down side of raid 3 is the large amount of disk overhead that you have be prepared to pay for.

I personally go for raid 3 for the speed/data protection thing. The down side of raid 3 is the large amount of disk overhead that you have be prepared to pay for.

With your raid 5, are you striping across controllers? I cannot think of another way you could do it.

Quote

Originally posted by ZWarrior
Actually Op, RAID5 is the fastest, based on the fact that seek times are now splits across the mulitple drives, and RAID0 is single drive dependent. But then that also depends on the application you are using the RAID for. I would agree that RAID0 for database access is best, as there is the striping.
Mirroring is... OK, but for reliability always go for RAID5 w/ striping.

opiesilver · « **Reply #9 on:** August 06, 2002, 02:06:55 PM »

The fastest raids I personally know of are all scsi fibre channel. They are running on a 2gb fibre channel switch and the starting price is around $48,000.00. Do you really want to go to la-la land with a dream config?

Your question is a bit confusing. What kind of bus are you thinking about? SCSI or ATA?

Quote

Originally posted by Morpheus
Opie, I love when you get geeky you BSEFH!

So I have loads of money, and want the fastest possible machine, and I don't care about data redundancy because all I do is play games on my machine, and like Rogue I reload several times a year. So I would want RAID 0 cause it's the fastest, right? Now could I do RAID w/ SCSI and would that be faster still, or would RAID with ATA 133 be the fastest?

Another sort of RAID question. If I have a RAID board 2 HD a DVD and a CDWR could I put them all on seperate IDE ports and they would all be "Masters"?

opiesilver · « **Reply #10 on:** August 06, 2002, 02:13:50 PM »

OK....stop. Go to this link and read:

http://www.mylex.com/documents/raid_levels.htm

Think about your question and ask again.

Quote

Originally posted by Morpheus
Oh I'm just full of questions today. My last post made me think of something else.

If the setup is RAID 0 with 2 HD's and I wanted to create a backup image so I could reload the way Rogue does, would I do 2 images? One of each HD or would it be one image? I'm assuming that with a RAID setup even though you may have 2 HD's you would see one C partition that is split between the 2 drives.

Well, that should get you BSEFH's and BOFH's and PFY's and OFG and CG's all something to post to.

Morpheus · « **Reply #11 on:** August 06, 2002, 02:46:36 PM »

I guess scsi fibre channel would be a little ridiculous. Let me try to simplify.

Which is faster SCSI or ATA/133 or perhaps Serial ATA (in the near future)?

Which is faster RAID or no RAID?

If doing RAID which is faster SCSI or ATA/133 or Serial ATA?

Keep in mind that this would be using a SCSI card and not native SCSI on the motherboard.

The questions are mostly for my curiosity, but also for planning for future upgrades. Currently I have 2 8gb 10,000rpm SCSI drives. (Only one can be plugged in at a time because I only have one SCA to 50 pin adapter, but I will be getting another one soon.) My SCSI card is an adaptec 2940. It is an older card but was good in it's day (10 Mbytes/sec Fast Synchronous (Fast SCSI) on the SCSI bus).

Just trying to figure out if I want my next "upgrade" to be an ATA drive or if I want to continue the SCSI setup.

Also I've looked at getting RAID integrated with my next Motherboard, and want to know if it's worth the trouble.

As for the other question about 4 devices all being on their own IDE channel, as I understand things, if you have a ATA/100 hard drive and a cd-rom/dvd/cdwr drive as a slave on the same channel, than the Hard drive will default to the speed of the cdr/dvd/cdwr. So one advantage of a motherboard with RAID might be that all components are on their own channel. Just a thought.

n1c · « **Reply #12 on:** August 07, 2002, 01:27:16 AM »

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Morpheus
Oh I'm just full of questions today. My last post made me think of something else.

If the setup is RAID 0 with 2 HD's and I wanted to create a backup image so I could reload the way Rogue does, would I do 2 images? One of each HD or would it be one image? I'm assuming that with a RAID setup even though you may have 2 HD's you would see one C partition that is split between the 2 drives.

Well, that should get you BSEFH's and BOFH's and PFY's and OFG and CG's all something to post to.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What i have now is two 30 gig 7,500rpm ATA100 HDD's And a 40 gig 7,500rpm HDD(All WD Caviares)

When you raid two HDD together with RAID 0 thay become one drive thats almost twice as fast
so when you use Ghost (or whatever prog you use) it looks at the two HDD's as one drive and when you go to restore the backup the MoBo (preferibly ABit) splits the data onto the two drives without any probs...........

I hope this helps you out....

ZWarrior · « **Reply #13 on:** August 07, 2002, 12:25:56 PM »

Striping occurs on each drive that is a member of the array. For real security, add in parity on an extra drive. Now that is fast AND stable!

opiesilver · « **Reply #14 on:** August 07, 2002, 02:25:01 PM »

You can't have your raid 5 without the parity. Only problem with raid 5 is that the write speed is sooooo sloooow. Yeah, you can read bloody fast, but what the point if you can't go the other way just as fast? Remember the whole point of this is speed.

n1c · « **Reply #15 on:** August 11, 2002, 03:29:23 PM »

i realy dont think its worth the hassle, i mean id still get a bord that can do RAID but its better to just use one HDD for windows and a nother for storage of backups

Morpheus · « **Reply #16 on:** August 12, 2002, 01:24:13 PM »

You don't have to have a RAID board to do that? Why would you spend the extra bucks?

n1c · « **Reply #17 on:** August 12, 2002, 07:29:22 PM »

because As far as i Know if you have a board w/intagraded RAID it takes up a lot less space and its easer to setup....

But I have an ABit MBoard w/intagraded RAID so... there you have it...

opiesilver · « **Reply #18 on:** August 13, 2002, 02:40:23 AM »

Well, serial ATA has arrived. However, the chipset controllers for mobos probably will not be ready until next year. Here's a link to the story over at Tom's;
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q3/020812/index.html

Morpheus · « **Reply #19 on:** August 13, 2002, 11:57:58 AM »

Sounds like the best strategy is to not change hard drive technology for a year or so until they move it away from the PCI bus and there is higher throughput. Save your money until then.

Boomslang · « **Reply #20 on:** August 14, 2002, 04:47:55 PM »

Toms hardware just did an a peice on raid.Ive been there done that and I'm back to one H/D with Ghost on a backup H/D

n1c · « **Reply #21 on:** August 15, 2002, 12:33:17 AM »

And thats where I am too...

Its just easyer and its kinda pointless to have RAID unless your running a big network

Spade · « **Reply #22 on:** August 15, 2002, 11:25:15 AM »

There is a lot of info out there if just search for pros and cons of raid and you will get alot of info. Here is a simple explaination if your interested. http://www.recoverdata.com/raidfaq.htm Personally, I agree with staying simple and put your money elsewhere. You can buy more speed in other areas then Raid.

ZWarrior · « **Reply #23 on:** August 15, 2002, 11:37:05 PM »

There really isn't a big gain for you in the RAID arena as a home user. Corporations can spend the money and need the gain, but you don't. Do like they said and add a second drive to ghost to.

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Author Topic: SCSI or ATA (Read 7870 times)