Hey guys i'm wondering which would be faster. I havnt seen any comparative benchmarks online yet about this. I have a SCSI-160 set up running in my current rig and wondering if i should upgrade to SATA or would that be a downgrade.
Right now you won't find a sata drive that will be as fast, probo, as teh drives aren't yet designed for the interface, over the next few months drive speed should increase rapidly in the sata/home martket sector. All sata drives right now are made on a design made to maximise efficiency at 80MB's transfer rates, or thereabouts, jsut what a pata cable can handle at its maximum. THe sata drives so far are simply the same but with a convertor added. Seagate have a what you could call "true" sata interface, but that means nothing to me as the drive itself, internally , spindle and mechanics wise, is still set up to work well on a pata cable. The raptor is to me , merely too expensive, despite its 10k rpm, it doesn't offer a performance increase in most area's, and can still be beaten by pata drives in areas. But again this is a first incarnation, and i believe it uses a sata convertor chip rather than being "true" sata controller. The new crop of hitachi drives could prove very promising. From testing every major drive in production right now, the 180gxp from ibm can match up to a dm 9+ , the 180gxp only has 60gb platters, while the dm9+ has 80gig platters. SO IBM/HItachi are getting very good performance from a lower density platter. The new drive is 80gb platter, and should raise performance again, and will be the first drive(bar the raptor) to be made after sata has become available everywhere on every new mobo and will hopefully have been designed accordingly. THe pata version of the new drive is out in the last few days in the UK, the sata version I still haven't seen yet though.
Id use SCSI any day over SATA tbh. Better technology as long as you're using a good card and a 10k+ disk.
To sum up btw, you will likely see a performance drop right now, but give that a month to 3-4 months and we will probo see some significantly faster sata drives, and you will probably be able to go to sata and , leaving enthusiasm behind you might not see, and probo won't see a performance increase, but the drop will probo not be too much, and you should be able to afford FAR larger drives. If thats what you want. EDIT: Bindi , why better tech? AFAIK for most people, onboard scsi(al la canterwood gigabyte at £250+) isn't very affordable, which means a still expensive scsi card limited to a 133MB/s pci bus? The only better thing bout scsi is better cables, drive speeds are only better in scsi as the cables can burst higher, there has been no point in faster rpm drives in desktop sector due to no advantage. AFAIK scsi drives are no different, just smaller due to price and warranty lengths needed and reliability due ot the sector they are used in. If sata cables can move as much data as a scsi cable, its gonna be the better option.
not necessarily the better option... reliability is the key here... would you rather spend £300 on a decent scuzzy setup (yes you can do this via ebay with all drives still under at least a year's warranty), or buy the *budget* SATA, which, is built to be fast, but also the reliablility is going to be lower. I mean, I have to renew my system drive every 12 months at the moment, because it either fails, or is on the virge of failing... therefore in my case, if I had £300 to throw around at a new hard drive array, I'd be off to the Scuzzy market to buy me a nice reliable setup, which I *know* is going to last
I cant be bothered to argue with u right now (in the nice way) but as he already has a U160 setup there's no point in changing thats all im saying. Unless he has an intel board with ICH5 so will SATA be limited to the PCI bus too?! I just prefer scsi stuff Ok limited useage and i havent touched a SATA disk cause im not convinced of their "performance advantage" from the stuff uve said. Im reluctant to agree about drive speeds increasing too. The sooner they find some viable solid state solutions the better. Also - fast SCSI disks in the "desktop" (are we talking enthusiast here? or would that be workstation?? im talking about enthusiast/workstation) sector are useful as boot drives - often the limiting factor is the harddisk access times as well as speed. Mind u SCSI stuff is hella loud
Going from u160 to S-ATA would be a downgrade, or perhaps a sidegrade if you were using a Raptor. It all depends on what you want to use it for, and how much you're willing to spend. Absolute balls out perfomance would be a few 15k (latest generation) cheetahs on a SCSI card. Introduce a multi-tasking environment and you'll notice the difference, even on 10K SCSI. There are drives now available that are native S-ATA. The Maxtor DM +9 is a very good drive, but won't match 10KRPM drives (ie SCSI). For that you'd need a Raptor. The Raptor is a very good drive and will easily match pretty much any SCSI drive in some situations (eg serving cached data). And I honestly don't mean to be arguementative, but if you see a system where a P-ATA drive is beating out the Raptor in anything but capacity, then I say that system is screwed
U recon its worth waiting for PCI-Express SCSI cards and getting a small, fast SCSI boot drive? Do any SCSI disks have fuild bearings that make them tollerable? /me has nightmares of 15k cheeta noise
Just for info, here are the results I got with my 2x80G SATA setup. http://www.btinternet.com/~vacheron/Diamondmax9_SATA_RAID0.gif Vach.
If it's just for the purpose of a boot drive, then perhaps a Raptor is the best move, then you're not waiting for the SCSI card on boot. If SCSI is already a part of the system, then PCI Express isn't going to make a difference on just a boot drive. I'm not sure about the noise factor.
No, there's no way in hell that ill let another western digi near my system to abuse my ears with it whiney noise
just got a fujitsu MAS (fastest drive in the world) and it actually isnt especially noisy, and the more recent 10k drives will be even less noisy, i know the most recent in the cheetah lines have something where it arranges the queue so it has to do less jumping around on the disk so accessing sounds more like e gentle hum than a grrr grr noisy noise. sure ultra high end 15k drives are louder than normal drives but its a good noise. and the fujitsu MAS is noticably lower pitched than a previous seagate 15k i had, which is nice. but there is no comparison between u160 and sata, 2 completely different things, its like saying "i have a dual athlon mp server but should i upgrade to a quad itanium 2?" if the money is there then why the hell not? personally i run a few fast u320/160 drives in mine, but only 18gb disks, and then 400GB+ of normal 8mb 7200rpm ata133 drives, works fine for me. on boot up there is about 5 secs going through the ids but i never really boot up, as i never really turn it off. and also keep in mind that u160 cards can use u320 drives. but at the end of the day ita always about money.
but there is no comparison between u160 and sata, 2 completely different things, Not trying to be perdantic, but afaik the scsi part of scsi drives is merely the interface? THe actual drive itself is no diff, bar the interface enables the use of faster drives, because there is no point having the faster drives on interface taht can't use the speed. IE, if i'm not wrong being interfaces, there ain't much diff between the actual connections here, though i don't know what speed the u160 interface can run at. The point im trying to make here, is people are judging sata on the drive available now. You could stick a 15k drive, small platters same reliability witha sata interface and get far far better performance than current sata drives. Also due to the cheapness of the interface, it can run jsut off normal sata ports onboard. I would have to think that sata150 is better than scsi overall(excluding what drives are available right now) as plenty of manu's are creating scsi/sata cards. And afaik a lot of big companies are expressing a lotta interest in them. THat or i could be totally wrong. What speed can u160 and u320 drives transfer at? PS as far as raptors go, mine runs so quietly i can't hear it normally, and can only jsut make out the writing noise. a 15k drive would obviously be louder, but i'd assume that most are used in server rooms where people don't sit all day, IE, they probo aren't designed, or money wasted on making them quiet?
Well, TBH thats debateable. For instance , what u160 setup does he have? if its a single drive, he may be able to sell that drive+card and afford a sata raid setup may out perform it? two dm9+'s would most likely offer a price acceptable trade off with teh scsi setup. Though i';m not sure how much a scsi card and drive could go for. Or within a few weeks the IBM sata's should be here, (or hopefully not long) which i believe may offer a nice boost in speed over dm9+'s. THen again, pata raid could also be a better option. IBM/HITACHI have always been excellent in raid. So maybe the new pata drive will be extremely fast. I've seen 120GXP's hit 64k in raid scores, (albeit sisoft, but many other benchies get very high). AFAIK the 180gxp's were faster, and with 20GB+ density higher than 180gxp's, these could be faster yet again. 70+ sisoft scores?
You people are deaf, i think my barracuda's are loud. id still never buy an IBM though, reguardless of speed.
There is a big difference between disks with S-ATA and SCSI interfaces. S-ATA disks (even the Raptor) are meant for desktops, workstations and low end servers. SCSI on the other hand is meant to be used not only in a high end multi tasking environment, but take much more of a beating doing it without running an increased risk of failure. They are manufactured that way. The technology developed for SCSI disks often filters down to ATA disks. And just to finish this point, the idea that manufacturers haven't come up with faster ATA disks because the interface couldn't handle it is complete fallacy. I'm not sure what SCSI/S-ATA controllers drunkenmaster was talking about, since you certainly don't get the two interfaces on the same controller. Perhaps he confused the impending SAS cards with what's available today? (But then again, it could just be me reading that sentence wrong). And why dump SCSI for S-ATA RAID as a boot volume? Then you're actually moving away from the desired effect and increasing average seek times as a trade off for increasing transfer rates. Even with the higher transfer rates, why would you want them? It's not like your average user regularly moves around files hundreds of MB in size. So again, we've come full circle. Speed + reliability = SCSI volume = ATA
set him straight bradford! when seagate and fijitsu start making 15k drives for sata ill consider it but its just not going to happen, and just to defend myself (although bradford already did) there is massive defference between scsi and ata drives besides the interface, i personally am not aware of any drive at all that is offered in both UWSCSI and ATA flavours, because there is simply no point, sure ata100 and ata133 and sata to an extent are just differences in interfaces but scsi is a whole 'nother ballgame. hell if the onlly difference was in the interface why havent i just been buying my 15k drives in the ATA variety and save some money on the scsi card?? haha, this is getting to be like sata/scsi fanboy thing, god help us all
