Re: Drives

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

Mark said:
> So, I'm in the drive buying business again.  I have one PCI slot avail for
> either a SCSI card or a UATA card.  What are people opinion on having a
> fast SCSI drive as a system drive and using two IDE drives as so-called
> data drives? 

I wouldn't.

> I'm looking for performance here.  I've seen Steve go from a "SCSI is the
> way." to "UATA is da bomb"  Now I can either go completely UATA or have a
> SCSI/IDE combo.  If you have any real-world experience let me know.  

I don't recall saying any really nice things about IDE.  The simple
fact is that IDE is the obvious choice for price/performance.  For raw
speed, you still can't beat 10k RPM SCSI disks, especially when you
RAID them on a Mylex or something.

If you attach IDE drives to a 3ware card, they get *much* more
appealing.  Plus, if you do a stripe set or RAID 5, the speed is
pretty impressive.

> Choices would be:
> 9Gig 10,000RPM SCSI drive and either one or two 40GIG IDE drive(s) 
>    non-UATA.
> 
> or 
> 
> 2 40Gig 7200RPM 100UATA IDE drives

Or you could do 3 IDE drives and a 4-port 3ware card so you could do
RAID 5...

> I'm liking that 3ware card Steve but I just can't afford it right now.  I
> want to move out of this PII and into a new AMD.

If you don't have money, don't get SCSI.  If you have enough money for
SCSI, surely you can afford a small 3ware card.  (The 2-port card is
$129.  That's a lot less than a SCSI card + 9GB disk.)

BTW, I can't recommend buying AMD at the moment.  Wait 3 months or so
for some of the current crop of chipset bugs to be figured out.
Besides, the SMP Athlon boards should be coming out soon...

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7320             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/
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