The Push For SCSI (or at least Serial ATA)

[syco]

Originally posted by Inhale420


i have an IDE RAID 0 setup on my pc, and it's definitely fast enough to notice a difference. apple needs to get a heads-up on some of these cool new technologies. except IDE RAID is like 2-3 years old now.

I think I heard on some rumor site that Apple is supposed to adapt RAID into their new PowerMacs.

 

[death]

Originally posted by Chryx


Actually, my 120GB Western Digital special edition nudges up really close to 50MB/s sustained, the Seagate X15-36LP (15k rpm) is up around 65MB/s

(your point mostly stands, but your numbers were outdated )

Perhaps I should clarify. WD's 200 GB 8MB will benchmark at over 40 MB/s, but his 80 GB IBM will not. Your 120 GB model will read near the inner edge at slightly under 50MB/s, but it's outer edge will be under 30. Your basic inner/outer average will scrape 40, barely.

And as for MacBandit's statements about SCSI being

Sorry but SCSI is all but dead with the price and speeds of the modern ATA drives

, if you meant that few consumers buy it, I would agree with you. But it is not obscure like Beta (I assumed by this you meant that IDE's complete victory is inevitable) IDE will never replace it in the server/workstation market unless something truly remarkable happens, and there are many more important factors than raw transfer speed and cost. If you agree to this, then I am happy to agree with you, as I personally have never used SCSI in my house computers (not even in my server).

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by death


Perhaps I should clarify. WD's 200 GB 8MB will benchmark at over 40 MB/s, but his 80 GB IBM will not. Your 120 GB model will read near the inner edge at slightly under 50MB/s, but it's outer edge will be under 30. Your basic inner/outer average will scrape 40, barely.

And as for MacBandit's statements about SCSI being , if you meant that few consumers buy it, I would agree with you. But it is not obscure like Beta (I assumed by this you meant that IDE's complete victory is inevitable) IDE will never replace it in the server/workstation market unless something truly remarkable happens, and there are many more important factors than raw transfer speed and cost. If you agree to this, then I am happy to agree with you, as I personally have never used SCSI in my house computers (not even in my server).

I did not mean a complete victory by comparing it to Beta. There has not been a complete victory with VHS over Beta either. Beta is still a standard in most tv editing studios. It's just been relegated to pro and prosumer use only just as SCSI has. I personally have had several SCSI drives but not for several years now.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by Inhale420


i have an IDE RAID 0 setup on my pc, and it's definitely fast enough to notice a difference. apple needs to get a heads-up on some of these cool new technologies. except IDE RAID is like 2-3 years old now.

I think maybe you inhaled too much at 4:20. All the new PowerMacs are capable of supporting IDE or SCSI raids internally in 2 drive ATA or 2 or 4 drive SCSI configurations.

 

[beefstu01]

C'mon. Who's holding out for solid state drives? (Segate had them a while back. No moving parts, no noise... it's perfect, except for the $5000 price tag for 5 gigs).

 

[MacCoaster]

Originally posted by MacBandit
I think maybe you inhaled too much at 4:20. All the new PowerMacs are capable of supporting IDE or SCSI raids internally in 2 drive ATA or 2 or 4 drive SCSI configurations.

Not by default, but as a BTO option.

 

[Dr. Distortion]

I'd never ever trust mission critical data to an IDE harddisk. Let's ask ourselves a question, try to answer honestly... If you were NASA and about to choose a harddisk which would be included in the next Mars explorer... would you choose IDE or SCSI?

-Dr. D.

 

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by Dr. Distortion
I'd never ever trust mission critical data to an IDE harddisk. Let's ask ourselves a question, try to answer honestly... If you were NASA and about to choose a harddisk which would be included in the next Mars explorer... would you choose IDE or SCSI?

-Dr. D.

i would definitely choose solid state.

 

[ddtlm]

This is the fastest drive available, the 3rd generation of 15,000-RPM disks from Seagate:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200209/20020901ST373453LW_1.html

They claim sustained transfer is 76-51 MB/sec, depending on the track. Not bad for one disk.

I've got a pair of Seagate's 10K.6 10,000-RPM 72GB disks and a pair of Maxtor's 10,000-RPM 36GB Atlas 10K-III disks... these drives are all quiet and they all run pretty cool. The Maxtor's are just barely warm in a Quicksilver case.

Won't deny that serial ATA is a good thing though.

 

[daveg5]

cant we all just get along

I am into pro audio and scsi has served me well and ide has served me well, they both have good and bad points. ant there are many sites that explain them for my audio work and all my os and multimedia programs are loaded on the very quiet and very cool and very fast seagate cheetah 15k.3 about $220 only 18gb but that,s much more than i eed as many of my 24-48 tracksongs are underone 1gig. the os now flies with the small access time and low cpu overhead. now for storage i use a wd with jumbo cache and a very quiet seagate silent drive about a $100 for 80GB. These work great for most of my average programs and what nots. after a song is completed I simply copy it to ide from scsi for storage and when it is ready to master i copy it back to scsi and save it on cdr for hard copy. I hate those new 1 year warranties on ide glad i got mine early. I will soon add another 15k.3 drive to take my u160 card to the limit using raid. a 128 tracks should be easy. I love scsi, i love ide why fight when we can be friends and both do are specific roles and compliment each other

 

[syco]

Re: cant we all just get along

Kumbayah my lord...

 

[daveg5]

Re: Kumbayah

Originally posted by syco
Kumbayah my lord...

Kumbayah
Oh lord
Kumbayah
Great song!!!!
I plan on a new powermac next year and I am hoping for serial ata or at least ATA/133 4 ports. Apple is right now way behind at ATA/66 and ATA/100. but I would even love u160/320 on the motherboard.

 

[daveg5]

Re: Re: Kumbayah

Originally posted by daveg5

Kumbayah
Oh lord
Kumbayah
Great song!!!!
I plan on a new powermac next year and I am hoping for serial ata or at least ATA/133 4 ports. Apple is right now way behind at ATA/66 and ATA/100. but I would even love u160/320 on the motherboard.

second have.
before anything though Apple needs to catch up and update its acient pci board to pci-x so we can really use those raids and other pci stressing cards, not to mention usb 2.0 for the scanners, and firewire2 4 ports each and 1 in front. i hate seeing more firewire ports on pcs than macs. back to 1MB L2 cache and real ddr capability, quieter fans, lower prices and if it is posible {does anyone know} tri and quad G4's for the mid and high line and of course give me one free.

 

[BenderBot1138]

Push for Fast Disks

I have a disk that is big and spins really fast too... it's called a frisbee ... but I wouldn't put any data on it.

 

[daveg5]

Originally posted by Nipsy
As a longtime SCSI holdout, the price performance ratio finally caused me to switch.

I have a 480GB RAID in my machine for $750, which gives me 90MB/s sustained read, and 75MB/s sustained write (4 x IBM 120GXP and a SIIG 133 RAID card).

For about the same price, I could have acheived these speeds with SCSI (2 Cheetahs and a Dual channel U160) card, and had a whopping 36GB to work with.

I still dislike some of the IDE penalties as far as read/write delays, but for anyone who's bothered, SCSI is always a BTO option.

Neither SCSI nor IDE are going to break 50mb/s (sustained) in single drive configurations anway.

It is impossible to justify the costs for consumers, business users, and anyone not dealing with db/video/48 track audio, etc.

IDE is about $1/GB, and SCSI is $10...people already complain that Macs are too expensive.

Notes:

SCSI Drives are always hot-swappable (provided they are in an appropriate carriage).

A dual IDE RAID on one channel will likely give 130-140% performance, because IDE does not process commands in parallel.

A dual SCSI RAID on one channel will usually give 160-170% performance, as SCSI accepts concurrent instructions.

New Seagate Cheetahs 15Ks do run quiet, and cool, but are still very expensive.

Memory round trips are measured in nanoseconds (~10), SCSI seeks start at 3MS, plus the round trip to the drive, so paging to a drive is still 30 times slower than visiting RAM.

 

[daveg5]

As a longtime SCSI holdout, the price performance ratio finally caused me to switch.

RE: I am still holding out proudly while accepting ide at the same time

I have a 480GB RAID in my machine for $750, which gives me 90MB/s sustained read, and 75MB/s sustained write (4 x IBM 120GXP and a SIIG 133 RAID card).

Re: price performance wise that is probably the best set up I heard the 8 MB buffer WD are slower then the 2MB buffer IBM's in Raid arrays, i guess the larger buffer gets in the way.

For about the same price, I could have acheived these speeds with SCSI (2 Cheetahs and a Dual channel U160) card, and had a whopping 36GB to work with.

re: my cost
Sonnet ATA/100 card $99
seagate fluid bearing 7200 ide $114
WD800JB 7200 ide $109
Seagate 15k.3 u320 15000 scsi drive $229
Atto dual 80 u60 card $30
{Seagate #2 15k.3 card not bought yet $229}
total: $810 140-150MB/s scsi raid
(2 x Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 and u160 card}
(1 wd800JB+1 segate fluid bearing 80GB ide drive and ata/100 card)
196GB unformated.
granted most people dont need 90+MB per second transfers or work with 48+ audio tracks and this is overkill but i am loving it. fast and lots of space. but i must admit your setup is probably the best for most non power users

I still dislike some of the IDE penalties as far as read/write delays, but for anyone who's bothered, SCSI is always a BTO option.

RE: and acces speed

Neither SCSI nor IDE are going to break 50mb/s (sustained) in single drive configurations anway.

RE: the 15k.3 does

It is impossible to justify the costs for consumers, business users, and anyone not dealing with db/video/48 track audio, etc.

RE: in most cases you are right

RE:

DaveG5:
I almost did exactly what you did, but for me I decided to keep both scsi and ide. I did not want to use ide raid because of an article in macworld that tested four of them and said each drive added only added 25 % to the transfer rate and cpu overhead.
also i can only fit 4 drives max and already had a u160 card and a loud first generation ibm scsi twice the physical size of drives now.
i wanted quiet, got a segate ide with fluid bearings Was twice as fast as my old 10000 IBM. i still cant hear it{would be great in a cube} then i heard of the wd 80GB jumbo model. i got that 25% faster then segate just a little noisier. now the choice: take scsi and ide cards out get 2 ide raidcards and 2 mor wd800JB's. thats what I was about to do until I saw the review of the 15k.3 on http://www.storagereview.com
. Since i plan on eventually doing more 64-128 tracks when i get a new powermac next year i knew that just one of these 18GB at $229 {5 year warranty} would almost equal your 4 drive array in speed{i will add 1 more later to saturate the 160MB limit of my card. and I still have 2 large ide drives for data storage. not a bad comprimise, not a comprimise at all

 

[daveg5]

Originally posted by Nipsy
As a longtime SCSI holdout, the price performance ratio finally caused me to switch.

I have a 480GB RAID in my machine for $750, which gives me 90MB/s sustained read, and 75MB/s sustained write (4 x IBM 120GXP and a SIIG 133 RAID card).

For about the same price, I could have acheived these speeds with SCSI (2 Cheetahs and a Dual channel U160) card, and had a whopping 36GB to work with.

I still dislike some of the IDE penalties as far as read/write delays, but for anyone who's bothered, SCSI is always a BTO option.

Neither SCSI nor IDE are going to break 50mb/s (sustained) in single drive configurations anway.

It is impossible to justify the costs for consumers, business users, and anyone not dealing with db/video/48 track audio, etc.

IDE is about $1/GB, and SCSI is $10...people already complain that Macs are too expensive.

Notes:

SCSI Drives are always hot-swappable (provided they are in an appropriate carriage).

A dual IDE RAID on one channel will likely give 130-140% performance, because IDE does not process commands in parallel.

A dual SCSI RAID on one channel will usually give 160-170% performance, as SCSI accepts concurrent instructions.

New Seagate Cheetahs 15Ks do run quiet, and cool, but are still very expensive.

Memory round trips are measured in nanoseconds (~10), SCSI seeks start at 3MS, plus the round trip to the drive, so paging to a drive is still 30 times slower than visiting RAM.