hard drives: to SCSI or not to SCSI?

[Okion]

I have been running on a 20 gb 7200 rpm 8.9 latency
maxtor disk.

Ran out of room, Now I need a new audio drive. I have this habit of
copying whole sessions just in case I want to get back to the way it was.

Any suggestions?

SCSI or not? If so what cards are good?

Does size matter or is just how you use it?

What RPMs? What latency?

Should I segment? If so to what size?

[vonbleak101]

SCSI rocks but unless you are using sessions larger than 32 tracks (mabey in Logic or something) or are heaviy into digital film making, the benifits of the added cost are somewhat lost. Sure you get slightly better seek times, but with the new ata 133 bus its only a little behind scsi (160) so i dont think its worth it. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[N-G-NEER]

I concur. The SCSI 160 seems to be a bit faster than ATA 133 but it's the continius throughput that tells the story. The PCI bus that carries the information is 133 Hmmmm!! I have used the new ATA 133 Maxtor quite drives and they ROCK!!!
They are way faster than the Wide SCSI 160's we have upstairs in the Video suite, and Imensely faster than the SCSI drives we have in the Audio Room. Digital Video by the way requires a very low throughput I have ATA 66 5400 RPM drives that can easily handle that. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Pako]

Well... Study's show that the optimum size for hardrives are in the sweet spot of 32-36GB hard drives... Regardless of seek times, the larger you get the slower performance you get. So SCSI or not, keep this in mind.

One advantage that SCSI has over IDE that nobody has mentioned is the fact that one SCSI adapter can support up to 16 different SCSI devices on one cable or daisy chain of cables. IDE, on the other hand, is limited to only Two devices per bus. With most IDE adapter cards only having 2 IDE bus's, that's only a total of 4 IDE devices.

Cost is a huge factor, but so is reliability. A redundant system is worth it's weight in gold, but then again, so are backups. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

I've run both IDE and SCSI for both video and sound productions, I'm running all 7200rpm IDE drives....2X 80gb's and 1x 40gb, but I'm also running 1x 36gb IBM SCSI 10k rpm as well as a 9gb 7200 RPM SCSI.

From my personal experience, Redundancy is worth the extra price for SCSI as well as the extra performance. In fact, I just sold my first born so I could get a couple 36gb 10k SCSI's (Still waiting for the time to install them....)

This has been my experience... I guess I would go ahead and fill up on the IDE's until you run out of IDE room, the go to SCSI to expand your HD resources..

The SCSI card I've been using is the GLYPH SCSI Ultra2 Card that I purchased from Sweetwater, which I see all they have now are adaptec SCSI adapters...

I can say I haven't one lick of trouble with my SCSI's....my IDE's on the other hand are a different story.

~Cheers~

[Okion]

Thanks for all the answers.

What about segmenting?

I can get a 120 or 80 gb with 8mb cash for a resonalbe price.

Would it just be better to get a 36gb disk with no cash and not segment?

Of all people I know I should know this. It's embarasing having to ask. I can't know everything about my line of work though, I'm more on the OOD software side than the driver level hardware stuff.

Thanks again.