you seem to be also forgetting that one of the main paoint of scsi is expandability, for instance you can put 7 drives per channel on a UWscsi card, compared to, hmm what was it, oh yeah , ONE drive per channel on sata cards. when you have 7 fast scsi drives on a single chanel trust me that 320MB/sec get s used to its fullest. and the only reason for scsi isnt bandwidth, its access times, reliability, and expandability. drunkenmaster you seem to think that it is all about bandwidth. as for your question about speeds fujitsu has quoted the max sustained transfer at 115MB/sec for their new drived, i have not had a chance to check this myself but i will do at some point in the near future. the access time for this drive is also quoted at 3.2ms, and i reckon probably about a 2ms latency so you will be looking at about 5.2ms average seek. another thing is that the drive has a 5 year warranty and a 137 YEAR MTBF, (1.2m hours) so you dont have to worry about it crapping out for a long time to come. sure you can get higher bandwidth from a stripe of 4 or so average ata drives than from a 15k drives, but that does nothing good for your seek times. but then again you can get some pretty sweet bandwidth from striping 4 15k drives. (ooh i have just had an idea )
Well, if he can afford 4 15k drives more power too him. Are scsi cards all PCI based, how can you get 320MB's transfer rates, or is that limited to setups with onboard scsi controllers? also with vlink on via at 533MB, intel still using 266MB link, i don't get where that speed could go. I dunno. Raptors also have 5 year warranty, but warranties don't mean drives won't fail, jsut you'll get a replacement if they do? I don't think its all about bandwidth, i'm pointing out that saying no to satasetup instantly, without asking him whats its for is pretty stupid, IMHO. I mean, what if he does huge amounts of video editing, or capturing, where highest transfer rates poss would be nice? I don't know, but i asked. I'm not really sure bout accessing though, doesn't a raid setup effectively reduce overall access speed as both drives can access at same time, but get two bits of data sent needed in one go? I'd need to go read up more on scsi drives out now, to see what bits are manufactured to a higher quality than ata drives, as i have no idea. Are yo usure its not jsut small spindles+less heat by a long way=more reliability? I dunno.
What do you mean by 'SCSI styled'? PCI expansion card based controllers? No, it increases transfer speeds, naturally. But it also increases seek times since it's physically impossible to reduce the average seek time of disks by RAIDing them. Then SCSI would still be better if he's willing to spend the money on the best disks. Otherwise, he could just get decent SCSI disks that suffer no capacity compromise next to a Raptor, but still offer advantages over it, since he's already got the controller in there. In a word, yes. One of the reasons SCSI disks are restricted to smaller sizes (GB wise) is that that's the only way to maintain the reliability standards. There is actually a market for ATA RAID arrays, where capacity is paramount, followed by performance and reliability. If manufacturers could produce faster ATA disks, they would exploit that fact. But they can't, so they don't.
I said effectively reduce acces times, as in to whole chunks of data, as instead of it being on one drive with one seek time rating, the same amount of data is spread of two drives, so in theory do they not acess different bits at the same time. I dunno how to explain what i mean well, but you should hopefully get my drift. I obviously didn't say that using a raid setup would physically change the drives No, i don't know what the scsi styled sata cards are, but i've heard about them, and manu's are very interested in them. Maybe its being touted as new scsi as they use not normal sata cables, but ones with a few more lines to be able to link up several drives on one cable. What percentage of people on these forums could afford a huge scsi raid setup, very few, and i'm just guessing, basing on the percentages, that he wouldn't be able to afford that. Also i'm sorry, manu's can produce faster ata drives if they want, but, you wouldn't know as ata cables are physically UNABLE to transfer data any faster. If you can come up with a reason why they can't make bigger rpm and faster transfer(more heads reading, more cache) then i'll listen, but the tech is there. Could you explain to me what it is that makes SCSI drives more reliable. I really don't know, not being padantic. Jsut don't know. As i see it, as with teh price ofthe raptor you are paying for the warranty. THe percentage of drives that will die in the 4th and 5th year over the first 3 years, let alone the 1 on most ata drives, is gonna be much higher. So there costs for replacing drives go up hugely, right? Hence a large proportion of the larger price. My guess would be smaller spindles just to help lengthen the life span due to smaller heat outputs. But another thing, in a home system you can have a much larger box with better airflow than in a rackmount, so heat is less of a problem, which would allow bigger capacities, without decreasing reliability.
