SCSI vs. Firewire

[jaygro]

I was wondering if I could hear some opinions on what you guys think is better. Firewire can transfer data at 400Mbps, SCSI can transfer data at 160Mbps. Firewire hard drives run at 7200rpm and SCSI harddrives run at 10,000/15,000rpm. Which to you think is the faster/more efficient one to use, speed going to the drive or speed reading the drive. The way I am thinking the higher rpms can only be used if you can get the data there as fast as possible. Do you get some sort of bottleneck at the begining or the end of the chain? Thanks for all input.

[vonbleak101]

While Firewire itself can transfer at 400Mbps, Firewire hard drives are simply ATA drives in external caddies, using firewire to connect to the comp, thus not using all of firewires bandwidth. There is no performance difference between a ATA133 internal drive and a firewire external drive, apart from being portable.

If you are looking for the most stable and reliable drives, then SCSI is still the king, why do you think they are heaps more expensive than ATA drives, because they are worse? I dont think so. But The benifit only comes with big sessions, if most of the time you are working with 16-24 tracks, the an ATA133 drive will be fine, if however you will working with 24+ tracks often then i would suggest going SCSI. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[where02190]

This is not totally true. The newest ATA drives with the 8mb cache outperform SCSI, and 80mb can be had for around $100.

Hope this is helpful.

[jaygro]

Where,
What ATA drives would you suggest? What is a good site for buying or info?
Thanks

[Mark_Knecht]

Hi...

Originally posted by vonbleak101:
While Firewire itself can transfer at 400Mbps, Firewire hard drives are simply ATA drives in external caddies, using firewire to connect to the comp, thus not using all of firewires bandwidth. There is no performance difference between a ATA133 internal drive and a firewire external drive, apart from being portable.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Basically true as a starting point, however 1394 can actually make an EIDE drive look faster than the same drive on an EIDE cable. 1394 allows multiple outstanding transactions to take place. This allows the OS to make MULTIPLE requests of the hard drive. While no drive can read more than one portion of the disk, the fact the there are multiple requests waiting in the hard disk controller allows the drive to optimize its reads and return data out of order. The Oxford 911 chipset does a bit of this, so there is a measureable improvement.

If you are looking for the most stable and reliable drives, then SCSI is still the king, why do you think they are heaps more expensive than ATA drives, because they are worse? I dont think so. But The benifit only comes with big sessions, if most of the time you are working with 16-24 tracks, the an ATA133 drive will be fine, if however you will working with 24+ tracks often then i would suggest going SCSI. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">This part I disagree with. A single audio track (44.1KHz, 24-bit) uses a bit more than 1Mb/S. 24 tracks of audio uses about 25Mb/S, well below the 400Mb/S that 1394 supports. I am currently (for test purposes only!) running more than 50 audio tracks off my 1394 drive using Ardour under Linux. The drive is having no trouble keeping up. (Not that you can run this many under PTLE, just an example of what a drive can do.)

If indeed you did think that your drive was limiting your system, why not use 2 1394 drives and split the audio on to both drives? You double your underlying drive bandwidth, and I think it's likely to be less expensive than one high end SCSI drive. You also gain some redundancy.

Just a few ideas....

Cheers,
Mark

[Marcel Mescher]

I can't say if firewire rules because I don't have a firewire drive. (have the 1394 card though)
I run my PC with an Ultra160 SCSI controller and
a damn good IBM DDYS-T18350N 10Krpm drive for 2 years now. (Paid the drive like hell 2 yrs ago...)
Now the Ultra160 card has become affordable and the 18,2GB drives too.
I also do video editing and there's nothing that works nicer than an LVD harddisk boasting tremendous data transfer power and the fastest seek times. Never ran into trouble with ProTools
And PS: I boot my system from one partition and have my PT audio files on another on the SAME drive. Don't take me wrong: I think ATA-100 drives have come a long way, especially the WD with 8Mb of cache (bought 2 of those for storage purposes) but I still prefer SCSI for audio / video applications.

[gabriel_p]

Yeah, that's why Okion stated Firewire transfering 50MBytes (400Mbits/8). Funny all this marketting specs Hype. Oops, Mark is here...shhh...Firewire is good I'm telling you folks [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] (Mark, I'm only kidding, ya know that! [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] )

[minimoog]

firewire can only operate at it's maximum speed when using an optical connection.

i can tell you through experience that a lowly 7200 RPM barracuda UW SCSI drive can play more tracks where high edit density exists than an external ata100 drive on the oxford 911 chipset. the superior seek times boasted by scsi drives are primarily responsible, along with reduced processor load, etc.

the biggest prohibative factor with scsi is the cost. for most purposes, firewire will do fine and it's great because you don't have to worry about conflicting id's or big, chunky expensive cables, among other things.

[where02190]

Originally posted by jaygro:
Where,
What ATA drives would you suggest? What is a good site for buying or info?
Thanks

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">the new Western Digital 80gb drives are a great deal at around $100. Make wur eto get the new one with the 8mb cache.

Best prices and availability check www.pricewatch.com

Hope this is helpful.

[Okion]

Firewire does not compare to USB 2.0. It's faster and cheeper.

If your computer is new it probably already has a USB 2/USB 1 port on it.

USB 2 equipment can work with USB 1 ports so if you were to use a USB 2 drive you could connect it to another computer that had only USB 1 and transfer files. With firewire you are stuck to only working with the small number of machines that have firewire already.

You can buy an inclosure for USB 2/USB 1 for about $60. Then put whatever drive you like it the inclosure.

Actualy if you want to be all around compatible you can buy a Firewire/USB 2/USB 1 enclosure for about $120 put the fastest drive you can find in it, and be compatible with everything.

That's what I did. Believe me the USB 2 connection was much better. Luckily for me the place that I bought it from (Fry's Electronics) takes returns and I took it back and traded for the USB 2 inclosure saveing the $60.