Fastest OS/Programs drive

davepdavep
edited June 2004 in Hardware
Hi there. Just hoping I could get some quick advice on a sufficient controller and how much ram to get for one 18gb, 15k scsi drive. I thought this would be faster than the raptor as a OS/Programs drive as it would minimize access time. I am not sure if there would be any benefit of a U320 vs U160 card.

Any help would be appreciated. I am using the asus p4p800e-dlx motherboard which has regular old pci unfortunately.

I think one drive would work better than raid too since I don't need fast transfer rates.

Anyone know if this would be the fastest OS/Programs drive vs a raptor?

Thanks, David

Comments

  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited June 2004
    davep wrote:
    Hi there. Just hoping I could get some quick advice on a sufficient controller and how much ram to get for one 18gb, 15k scsi drive. I thought this would be faster than the raptor as a OS/Programs drive as it would minimize access time. I am not sure if there would be any benefit of a U320 vs U160 card.

    Any help would be appreciated. I am using the asus p4p800e-dlx motherboard which has regular old pci unfortunately.

    I think one drive would work better than raid too since I don't need fast transfer rates.

    Anyone know if this would be the fastest OS/Programs drive vs a raptor?

    Thanks, David

    The beauty of scsi doesnt show with a single drive. All my systems are scsi eitrher in raid or as multi drive systems iwtha regular controller. Scsi is a bus in itself and can issue reads and writes to multiple drives basicaly at the same time so you want to divide or balance the I-O across multiple drives. have tempfiles, pagefile, OS/Programes etc... on seperate drives not one fast drive. You can get really fast 36gb u320 scsi drives on eBay for 70 bucks. Your much better off getting three of those then one slightly faster single drive even if your not going to raid them. And if you don't have 64bit slots you just crucify the performance of most the high end scsi raid controllers.

    I buy and sell used scsi drives and controllers and I specialize in setting up and tuning high end disk subsysterns.

    If your going to just get one drive then I doubt you will really feel any real life differance between the raptor and the scsi drive. The firmware on the scsi's are more optimized for the random access patterns prevalent in a multi-user server setup and the raptors are much more optimized for sequential reads and writes prevalent in a desktop setup.

    I'm running a LSI 320-2x 64bit pci-x raid controller with 512mb pc3200 ddr cache on board in one of my dual opteron servers. The huge cache blurs reality in many ways but a 32bit bus would kill it.

    We used to be able to post benchmarks here but I no longer see an option to attach images or I would of posted some benchmarks for ya.

    Tex
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