SCSI or IDE?

paulrmartin · Post by **paulrmartin** » Thu Jun 27, 2002 12:15 pm

10,000rpm or 7,200rpm?
I am facing the grim fact that my SCSI drive might have to go to the garbage bin...

Can anyone tell me if I would be making a bad move going to an IDE drive?

I am concerned with latency issues. I work with Logic 5 with Win98SE, PIII 933, 512M of RAM.

Thanks

Paul

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: paulrmartin on 2002-06-27 13:17 ]</font>

Neutron · Post by **Neutron** » Thu Jun 27, 2002 12:52 pm

Technically SCSI is better, but:

SCSI is allways on the PCI bus, it has to share bandwidth with your cards, Intel ICH chipsets do not use PCI bus for IDE.

IDE is cheaper

you could get an old computer and put it in your basement with SCSI drives for a reliable file server, it can be a real POS because it only has to serve files. you can pick up something like that if you done have one for less than $100 or scrounge it from someone. a P1 is even good enough.

Valium · Post by **Valium** » Thu Jun 27, 2002 1:58 pm

Hi there,

I work on a DAW completely installed with IDE drives, note that they are all 7200 rpm drives from seagate. In my other system I have scsi drives and as a test I tried some benchmarks and some audio stuff on that one to to see if the SCSI might offer some benefit... Well the result was ::: NO DIFFERENCE at all. I don't mean that scsi has no benefit on server apps but for my audio apps it doesn't mean a thing...

Hopes this helps greetz

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Thu Jun 27, 2002 4:43 pm

Carefull, are you sure you want to go to an ide burner? There is a recent discussion over at Audio Forums where some people are saying that SCSI burners sound better!

I don't think there's much in it myself.

Post by **garyb** » Thu Jun 27, 2002 7:45 pm

i have an ide drive for audio data and have had no problems with logic 5.13.

Micha · Post by **Micha** » Fri Jun 28, 2002 12:39 am

SCSI drives are faster in random access because they usually rotate faster and heads are more intelligent. But random access is not the point for audio. You don't want to have your tracks spreaded and splitted across the drive. That is why we all defragment our partition from time to time. 1 track in 1 continous block, that is how we all like it. And this can be very well handled by drives like the very quiet Barracuda IV.
In short: IDE/UDMA 5 is perfect.
Happy pulsaring
Micha

paulrmartin · Post by **paulrmartin** » Fri Jun 28, 2002 4:32 am

Thank you very much for your replies.

You have been very helpful. Maybe I will be finally rid of that awful fan noise!

algorhythm · Post by **algorhythm** » Fri Jun 28, 2002 5:13 am

Paul - if its anything, I had a rippin' fast 10k SCSI drive. I sold my SCSI card and HD, got another IDE @ 7200, had cash to spare, and still have a high enough track count for my needs. And I no longer have a jet engine taking off in my rackmount case to boot!

_________________
.:algorhythm:. shouldn't you be making music or something?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: algorhythm on 2002-06-28 06:14 ]</font>

mjerom · Post by **mjerom** » Sat Jul 06, 2002 8:33 am

scsi is better for transfering data from a drive to another ( or a scsi cdrom )
but for data processing ( like audio )
you still have to go thru the pci bridge ...
a good way to improve access time is raid 0
( ide or scsi )but forget about defragmentation and the controler still need an irq ...
for quality/price ratio,
ide hdd are hard to beat

Micha · Post by **Micha** » Mon Jul 08, 2002 4:26 am

The advantage of SCSI regarding transfer was that each device is provided with its own bus. But so is Ultra ATA. That is why they doubled the cable from 40 to 80: each device has its own bus now. And with boards with ICH 2/3/4 (intel 8xx chipsets) even PCI is avoided. The only remaining advantage for SCSI is the bandwidth of 160 MB to 100/133 MB. Theoretically, since PCI is used.
Sorry, no real advantage for SCSI anymore, except faster random access.
Happy pulsaring
Micha

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Mon Jul 08, 2002 6:42 pm

Those extra 40 conductors are just ground conductors to prevent data problems from crosstalk. They don't actually carry any data.

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Mon Jul 08, 2002 7:20 pm

And for cdrom-cdrw-dvd especialy, scsi is still better, and IDE still cannot do paralel task (message queuing).

If you make cd2cd copy, scsi beat ide, more stable, better copy, and no cpu cycle. So you can still play a dvd while burn cd2cd. And also, you have more devices. I have

1 scsi cdrw
1 scsi cdr
1 scsi dvd
1 45gig IDE drive
1 80gig IDE drive...

That's 5 devices. With IDE only 4 is the limit.

Hard disk is very good and cheap on IDE ata100 or 133, but cdrom,dvd,cdrw is still better on scsi, and allow you to have more devices.

BTW i still use and old 4.5gig scsi hardisk externaly mounted in a cdrom case to exchange samples and programs with a friend that has a real sampler with scsi port. You cannot do this either with IDE. I use ChickenSys translator to format that scsi hd to whatever format i need (namely EMU) then drop a bunch of program (akai or giga) on it and it's perfect for this.

So conclusion, both are really good in their respective use. Storage and OS on IDE, cd+dvd+cdrw on SCSI, data exchange with the rest of the world with external scsi HD.

My 0.02cents

The Z Station · Post by **The Z Station** » Wed Jul 10, 2002 5:59 pm

This is quite a very interesting read, albeit a little dated (2 years old).

http://www.digitalprosound.com/Htm/Tech ... IvsIDE.htm

Regards,
Z

orbita · Post by **orbita** » Thu Jul 11, 2002 1:00 pm

Dont forget, you can also get cheap ide cards to expand your ide setup if you need more than 4 devices. I have a promise TX2 card in my server that coupled with my onboard raid and regular IDE gives me up to 12 ide devices.
the TX2 board also gives you 133mbit bandwidth (which actually doesnt help much) and more importantly, support for drivers larger than 128gb. I run a 160gb maxtor on it and a 150gig raid1 array.

DJATWORK · Post by **DJATWORK** » Tue Aug 27, 2002 11:22 pm

The people here that answering this topic, had all used SCSI and IDE drivers??

I do.

SCSI drives are absolutely SOLID, you can always trust, and I don´t know many people that could crash a SCSI disk.
There are millions of stories around of people that had lost ALL their DAW data, even in a middle of a session, using IDE drives.
The SCSI disk, just "retire" when they become too small for the audio recording.

How match would you pay to get your information back if you crash a drive?
may be the difference between a IDE and SCSI disk?

Another very important thing that not many people know, is that SCSI disks have A LOT of internal configurations that let you optimise for example, for digital Audio and Video processing.

A "Standard" or "not optimized" SCSI Disk may "appear" to have the same performance and capabilityes than an IDE drive, but even in those not optimized disks you can seriously note that the fragmentation is really less than any IDE drive, so your SCSI disk won´t be very fragmented between the defragmentations, having a REAL better performance, and as it is less fragmented, the defragmentation process will be really faster...

IDE drives are great,but if you wan´t professional and safe results, the best is a mix system, for the performance and for the money spening. A small SCSI Disk Drive (may be 18 GB) for hard working, and many IDE drives for archive the audio.

that´s my experience...

Valium · Post by **Valium** » Wed Aug 28, 2002 12:48 am

Well DJATWORK sorry to dissapoint you but from my own experience I can say that SCSI doesn't make it into my systems anymore. I've had 3 scsi drives die on me within a year and all of em did in the middle of a session. The drives where all IBM drives connected to a Adaptec card, those weren't the cheapest drives at all. When I tried to RMA them I had to wait 3 weeks to get replacements. Can you imagine: 3 weeks without pay??? Let me tell you I now have systems built around IDE drives and I noticed just a little performance drop that really isn't that big a deal. At least my work is safe now, since for the price of the three SCSI I now loaded up my systems with 3 IDE drives and one removable bay where I have 2 other IDE drives that regularly backup my systems. Another thing, the SCSI drives were quite noisy when they were spinning at 10.000 rpm's and now with the IDE I can hardly hear em (seagate's).

I can only speak for myself but when somebody asks me what to pick SCSI or IDE, I don't think nowadays it makes that big a difference anymore so I always recommend IDE drives.

Anyway, of to do some more work,

Greetz

DJATWORK · Post by **DJATWORK** » Fri Aug 30, 2002 12:32 am

Not agree with others is the best for the forum! so we can tell our experiences in some topics, and get the others in other forums!

Around this forum there are some topics talking about the IBM disk drives and their problems... (IBM Deskstar, I think)

Anyway, I do not recomend IBM drives for Audio Recording, for other reasons like some "disk protections" like energy savings, low noise and low spinning, etc etc that are not really apropiate for a DAW.
Maybe Seagate in SCSI or Western Digital in IDE are the best for me for a DAW...

Another thing is BCKUP, or data moving in a IDE enviroment... disk-to-disk data transfer is really faster on scsi systems, and sometimes, rearrange your files or making backups can take a long time...

In the other hand is true that today the cost/benefict proporcion is really better with IDE drives, but if you can pay that "big extra" for a SCSI system, or a mixed system, I still thinking that is the best choice.

Somethin similar ocurrs (comparing) in the discussion PC/MAC...and again the cost/benefict appears.

IDE-SCSI is a very old discussion that I think will never end, we can only say what we think, and thats good for other people to make their own desicions...

I "feel" better working with audio in my SCSI disk, and storing in IDE disk, and 3 IDE disks had crashed in the same time that I still using the same SCSI disk... thats my opinion and my experience...

DJATWORK