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which is faster? sata or scsi?
- Thread starter Beholder2
- Start date
The answer is: It depends. A 15K RPM SCSI drive will give much performance than a SATA II drive. That being said, an off-setting factor is that 15K SCSI drives can cost 3 to 4 times an equivalently sized SATA II drive. Also, SCSI controller cards (good ones) coast significantly more than SATA II controller cards.
First, ALL disc drives require cables. If not directly to the drive then to the cage housing them. The reason that SCSI drives are commonly seen in cages is that they are more likely to be used in RAID arrays and are generally hot-swappable in case of drive failure making them ideal for use in file servers or NAS servers.
Mike, The IT Guy
Some manufacturers (DELL, for one) make drive cages for SATA II drives BUT they are bolted in place and are NOT hot-swappable.
If what you are looking for is ultimate access (read/write) speed and cost is not an issue, look into fibre channel drives. But be warned: they make SCSI drives look cheap by comparison, but they do blow SCSI away in terms of performance (currently 4Gb per sec).
Life is too short to drink warm beer....
First, ALL disc drives require cables. If not directly to the drive then to the cage housing them. The reason that SCSI drives are commonly seen in cages is that they are more likely to be used in RAID arrays and are generally hot-swappable in case of drive failure making them ideal for use in file servers or NAS servers.
Mike, The IT Guy
Some manufacturers (DELL, for one) make drive cages for SATA II drives BUT they are bolted in place and are NOT hot-swappable.
If what you are looking for is ultimate access (read/write) speed and cost is not an issue, look into fibre channel drives. But be warned: they make SCSI drives look cheap by comparison, but they do blow SCSI away in terms of performance (currently 4Gb per sec).
Life is too short to drink warm beer....
Beholder2
Perhaps you can give us an idea of your present hardware setup and what you are trying to achieve, that way we have the bigger picture and can advise you properly on what is best "for you"
Martin
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Perhaps you can give us an idea of your present hardware setup and what you are trying to achieve, that way we have the bigger picture and can advise you properly on what is best "for you"
Martin
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- Thread starter
- #4
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. I've been running my current system into the ground its about 5 years old now. I need to run many apps at the same time such as cinema 4d, painter (using 75meg + files), excel, firefox, games etc.. my current system is just inadequate and I want to upgrade one thing at a time as I can afford it.
I've looked into getting the Seagate ST3146854SS which is a 146.9gb drive running at 15000 rpm, 8mb, using the Serial attached scsi. I know the SAS beats the ultra 320 but I'm not sure what the current specs are for fibre channel today by that i mean what its transfer rates are, and if its bus uses contention. I will probably add more drives in the future but I don't really need the ability to add thousands of drives that the fibre channel may offer. I definetly need some speed here and capacity isn't that big of an issue nor is cost. They make this Seagate CHEETAH model in all different interfaces. Thanks for any further advice.
Rob
I've looked into getting the Seagate ST3146854SS which is a 146.9gb drive running at 15000 rpm, 8mb, using the Serial attached scsi. I know the SAS beats the ultra 320 but I'm not sure what the current specs are for fibre channel today by that i mean what its transfer rates are, and if its bus uses contention. I will probably add more drives in the future but I don't really need the ability to add thousands of drives that the fibre channel may offer. I definetly need some speed here and capacity isn't that big of an issue nor is cost. They make this Seagate CHEETAH model in all different interfaces. Thanks for any further advice.
Rob
Beholder2
I have a feeling that any five year old machine will seriously limit the performance of modern storage devices, there are simply too many bottlenecks caused by older chipset/memory bus limitations.
I recommend upgrading the platform before adding the fast storage.
The would be the more sensible way to go in my opinion
Martin
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I have a feeling that any five year old machine will seriously limit the performance of modern storage devices, there are simply too many bottlenecks caused by older chipset/memory bus limitations.
I recommend upgrading the platform before adding the fast storage.
The would be the more sensible way to go in my opinion
Martin
We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.
Quick note on this: It seems there may be a little contradiction of ideas, Beholder2:
It's not totally contradictory, but it does appear that way.
I definitely say upgrade the system platform (as said paparazi) if cost is no issue.
If cost IS an issue, try doing some looking at your system to determine what is the first "bottleneck" as mentioned by paparazi. You may not can afford to upgrade the whole platform (mobo/cpu/memory) at one time.
If your whole system is 5 years old, and you are suffering as far as performance goes, and money is no issue, I highly suggest just doing a full rebuild, or buying a new system from a vendor.
If you want some suggestions on upgrading one piece at a time, maybe you can list your hardware details here, and let some users offer suggestions on "temporary" upgrades, possibly.
So, tell us what your Motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics adapter, current hard drive(s) are now, and we can go from there.
But once again, if money is no factor, and performance is really importat, you'd be better off doing a new build - SCSI vs. SATA2 may not be as important as you are thinking in that case. Now, with the dual-core processors on the market, you can run lots more stuff all at the same time without the same performance hits as processors 5 years ago.
and
It's not totally contradictory, but it does appear that way.
I definitely say upgrade the system platform (as said paparazi) if cost is no issue.
If cost IS an issue, try doing some looking at your system to determine what is the first "bottleneck" as mentioned by paparazi. You may not can afford to upgrade the whole platform (mobo/cpu/memory) at one time.
If your whole system is 5 years old, and you are suffering as far as performance goes, and money is no issue, I highly suggest just doing a full rebuild, or buying a new system from a vendor.
If you want some suggestions on upgrading one piece at a time, maybe you can list your hardware details here, and let some users offer suggestions on "temporary" upgrades, possibly.
So, tell us what your Motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics adapter, current hard drive(s) are now, and we can go from there.
But once again, if money is no factor, and performance is really importat, you'd be better off doing a new build - SCSI vs. SATA2 may not be as important as you are thinking in that case. Now, with the dual-core processors on the market, you can run lots more stuff all at the same time without the same performance hits as processors 5 years ago.
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