Harddisk Drives - ATA vs SCSI

[Clay Stahlka]

When recording greater than 24 tracks of audio I am still a proponent of using the fastest 10k or 15k UW SCSI drives. In my work, I do a large amount of editing and have my edits scattered all over the drive. Has anybody had success with a lot of tracks and edits on UDMA-100 drives? Or, is everybody still using the Seagate Cheetah UW SCSI drives? Its such a large difference in price. I really need reliability! Thanks in advance for the opinions.

[everett_chris]

There's no doubt the 15K cheetahs are one screaming drive. I have close to 100 of the things in our server room....but...getting SCSI to preform at it's potential can be a battle. In my (audio) system I went with UDMA-100, for ease and price and I hit processor long before disk. I can work with up to 16-20 tracks without any problems, much past that I run into processor limitations. I would guess that I could get close to 48 tracks without running out of disk preformance.

I wouldn't worry about reliability too much....Of course, you back up often, right?:D

[Clay Stahlka]

Chris, Do you have any favorite models of UDMA-100 drives that I should be looking at? I have had good luck with IBM Deskstar UDMA-66 drives, but have heard their UDMA-100's are not as reliable. Thanks!

[everett_chris]

I've been using the Maxtor drives, and I've been happy with them. I've heard the same thing on the IBM units, but I don't have any personnal experience to back that up.

Also, I did some tests last night, and found that I was able to track 40 24-bit tracks successfully (although it took awhile between hitting record, and actually starting) I was having more trouble with playback, but once I got all of the caching turned off it worked well.

[Neil Parfitt]

The SCSI vs IDE battle been going around for a long time... at this point in time i think IDE would be the way to go - wait - just think about it before flaming me! :)

It's soo damn cheap and justifying the cost of the scsi drives is questionable when i can put together a RAID array using IDE drives for the same price.

Now - people will argue that the performance is better on the SCSI 160 drives - well sure - it is.. but we're not running datacenters for VISA right? CAn you justify the cost? I cant.

right now im running 4 quantum AS 30GB 7200RPM ATA100 drives using a promise fastrack RAID controller for my audio. in a 0+1 mode (stripe/mirror)

What this means is that 2 of the drives become one large drive and the other 2 drives are images in case a drive fails (rare these days)... the benifit - each drive is spreading the disk i/o load by 1/4...

so for real world tests i was able to get something like 20/mb sec read 34ps mb write with a single drive.... with the 4 drives running RAIDED these figures have jumped up to just under quadruple.. and this is sustained data transfers!

remember - SCSI 160 doesnt mean you'll get 160mb/sec.. o no.. not even close.. same with ata100.

And knowing im not making a single drive crunch all this data out - i know my drives will last longer as well..

check out www.promise.com

Cheers,

~Neil

[Geeheeb]

Originally posted by everett_chris
There's no doubt the 15K cheetahs are one screaming drive. I have close to 100 of the things in our server room....but...getting SCSI to preform at it's potential can be a battle. In my (audio) system I went with UDMA-100, for ease and price and I hit processor long before disk. I can work with up to 16-20 tracks without any problems, much past that I run into processor limitations. I would guess that I could get close to 48 tracks without running out of disk preformance.

I wouldn't worry about reliability too much....Of course, you back up often, right?:D

Get the hard drive cooling kit, and those problems are solved with the DMA 100 drives! :D