What's a good, cheap Scsi U320 controller card?

JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
edited August 2004 in Hardware
Being a bit of a scsi newb, can anybody recommend a good cheap Scsi U320 controller card please. It doesn't need raid and its to go in my Athlon64 Asus K8V setup. Connected to it would 1x Seagate Cheetah 15K pm 18g drive & 1x Seagate Cheetah 15K pm 73g. Currently they are connected to an Lsi u160 card so I'm not getting the full benefit of these drives.

Also if anybody has something suitable for sale then shoot me a pm.

Thanks

Comments

  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited August 2004
    LSI 21320-is. And just so you know those drives bench the same on the lsi u160 card as the u320 card. The u320 gives more bandwidth so you could hook up more drives to a single channel without saturating the bandwidth. But you can hang the two fastest u320 drives made in the world today off a single channel on that u160 card and they run at full speed. I have both the u160 and u320 versions and like them both and I don't own a u160 drive anymore. I have like a dozen u320 scsi drives. If your u160 card is dual channel you can gain a small amount in some real world activities by hanging one drive on each channel but even that is marginal.

    But in real life you need to do a couple things to maximize the benefits of having the two scsi drives. Have a pagefile on both. XP will pick the one with the least activity to page to or if there is low activity to both it will page to both at the same time. Keep the OS on one and your user files on the other including the internet temp files and user temp files. You want to balance the I-O so that both drives are being accessed. When it loads a program from one you want it paging to another etc...

    But if you have a dual channel u160 controller your good to go with up to four drives, two per channel and remember to saturate the bus you would STILL need them all blasting full speed with max data flowing to each drive and since they are not in raid thats hard to do unless you do copies from two drives to the other two. If its a single channel in real life you could still run even three of the fastest drives because all three would rarely being whacked with enough I-O to saturate a single channel.

    I love scsi and after years of experiance with this I would recomend getting another scsi drive before getting a new controller even if you only have a single channel controller now. If you have the dual LSI then you can get at least two more scsi drives !

    What I am trying to say is that with two drives on a single channel u160 controller they won't bench any faster nor will you be able to tell any differance in the feel what so ever after the upgrade. If it was me I would spend the 70 bucks on another scsi drive.

    Tex
  • JimboraeJimborae Newbury, Berks, UK New
    edited August 2004
    Hi Tex,

    Thanx for the reply, very enlightening & has saved me alot of money. My controller is an lsi 21040 so they'll have to go on the same the same channel. I'll try the tricks out like the page file etc and see how it goes.

    Once again Tex Support come through. :)

    Cheers

    Jim
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