SCSI ultra 320 vs. ATA-100

[hacker_cracker]

Hi!
I have another question. I may be getting some Seagate Cheetah ultra 320 SCSI drives, and a controller card soon. I know how to set up basic SCSI chains, but my question is: If I set up these drives in RAID 1, and use them to boot off of, would there be a noticable speed differance over ATA-100, which I am using now? If so, I want to use these drives for Windows and applications, and demote my ATA-100 drives to storage. Thanks in advance!

(PS, I know SATA's probably better, but I'm broke. My brother's giving me the SCSI drives for free, since he dosen't need them anymore.)

[SpywareDr]

If you're talking about the Seagate Cheetah ST3146854LW (147GB / 15,000 RPM / 3.5 ms avg seek / 8MB Cache / SCSI Ultra320 68pin), it'd be tough to find an ATA or SATA drive that'll match it for reliability and speed.

[init2650]

SATA drives support speeds up to 10,000 rpm and mean time between failure (MTBF) levels up to 1 million hours under an !!!EIGHT HOUR!!!, low-duty cycle.

SCSI drives support up to 15,000+ rpm and an MTBF of 1.4 million hours under a !!!24-hour duty!!! cycle

comparing SATA and SCSI is like apples and oranges. SCSI wins in speed and reliablity, you've got a NICE set of drives!!!!

[hacker_cracker]

I think they are 36Gb drives that come from retired Win2k workstations. I'm going to run Sea Tools on them first to make sure they're in good working order. It'll be a couple of weeks before I get them, but I'll post back when I do.

[SpywareDr]

There are several models available in that size:

ST336607LC    Cheetah 10K.6    37 GB    Ultra320 SCSI   10000 RPM   4.7 ms avg   MSS&W 
ST336607LW    Cheetah 10K.6    37 GB    Ultra320 SCSI   10000 RPM   4.7 ms avg   MSS&W 
ST336753LC    Cheetah 15K.3    37 GB    Ultra320 SCSI   15K RPM   3.6 ms avg   MSS&W 
ST336753LW    Cheetah 15K.3    37 GB    Ultra320 SCSI   15K RPM   3.6 ms avg   MSS&W 
ST336754LC    Cheetah 15K.4    37 GB    Ultra320 SCSI   15K RPM   3.5 ms avg   HPS&W 
ST336754LW    Cheetah 15K.4    37 GB    Ultra320 SCSI   15K RPM   3.5 ms avg   HPS&W

In Seagate's "Find a disc drive" on the right, select "Ultra320 SCSI" in the first pulldown, "< 60.0 GB" in the second, and click "Go". http://seagate.com/

[hacker_cracker]

I'm not sure whether the drives are 10 or 15k RPM, but either way it beats 7200 RPM which is what my current boot drive is rated as.

[SpywareDr]

Not only is the 10,000 RPM 39% faster than 7,200, the 4.7ms access time is well over 200% faster than a standard 10-11ms drive.

(A 15,000RPM/3.5ms drive would be well over 100% faster on RPMs and 300% faster on ms access time).

Not only that, the MTBF of "1,200,000 hours" on the Ultra320 SCSI's is astounding ... something like 137 years?!

[hacker_cracker]

Would configuring the drives in RAID-1 speed things up even more?

[SpywareDr]

http://webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

RAID ...

• Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.

[hacker_cracker]

Oops! I meant to say RAID-0!

[SpywareDr]

http://webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

RAID ...

• Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

[hacker_cracker]

I'd like to give RAID-0 a try, then. I do regular backups, so I'm not worried about fault tolerance. I just want a big speed boost.

[SpywareDr]

Adaptec 39320A-R
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/pro...+HBAs+%26+RAID

Adaptec 39320A-R Specifications
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/sup...2fASC-39320A-R

Adaptec Ultra320 SCSI PCI-X HBAs & RAID Product Comparison
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/pro...+HBAs+%26+RAID

[SpywareDr]

BTW ...

http://windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=54179

Steve R Jones - Staff

Raid 0 doubles your chances of losing ALL data...

http://www.pcmech.com/article.php?cat=&id=296

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/...epts/index.htm

[hacker_cracker]

That's pretty scary, especially when I don't know how much wear and tear those drives have already been through. I think I'm going to try raid-0 on a test machine before I risk doing it on my main rig. I have a couple of old Pentium III machines that should do the job. As I said, I have backups, but I'd rather not have to use them.