View Full Version : Hard Drive advice - SCSI or IDE?
I'm looking for a bit of advice on what new hard drive to buy.
I'm looking for a very fast hard drive, I want to use it for windows XP and my programs. Speed is the main factor I'm looking for, I want something that is very fast that will open applications like adobe photoshop & premiere fast and load windows faster.
My current hard drives are IDE (MAXTOR 7200 RPM, Cache 2 MB, MTR: 133 Mbps) They're old and far too slow
I'm just going to use them as storage for my files
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated
In terms of speed SCSI is A LOT faster than IDE but a lot more expensive. SATA fits somewhere in the middle being faster than IDE but not as fast as SCSI but offering best price performance in terms of cost per GB.
The latest and greatest drives are Serial Attach SCSI (SAS) but again are very expensive - if speed is key then definately go SAS, otherwise (normal or parallel) SCSI and, in either case, go for the 15,000rpm versions.
Another option to increase drive speed is to look at using RAID - again when building for speed RAID can be very expensive but RAID 0 or ideally RAID 10 will increase the speed even more especially when spread over multiple drives. Be warned though - RAID 0 while fast offers no protection in the event of disk failure and if you lose one disk you lose everything on them all. RAID 10 is the same concept performance wise but you get redundancy so can lose even up to 2 disks if you are "lucky" but you are only ever using 50% of the capacity hence it being expensive!
Jase
That is a great post Jase thanks man!
Is SAS faster than SCSI?
Price isn't a problem, performance is what is important to me (and reliability of coarse)
SATA is about the same price as IDE if you have a recent motherboard you should have a SATA controller best to check before you buy though
Jock Strap
09-01-06, 01:54 AM
I have SATA
dvtimes
09-01-06, 01:58 AM
SCSI is expensive. They are good for servers as you can add lots.
But IDE hardrives are cheep now.
You can get a 200 gb with 8 Cache for £50.
I use these for editing films and they are fine.
But it may not be the harddrives that is slow, you may be better off getting more memory.
To be honest pc's are so cheap at the moment mabe you would find it cheaper to simply to buyt a new pc, and use this for your editing purposes only, and use your current one for the net.
How much memory does your pc have. I personaly would not use less than 1gb of memory.
Also you may find if you add a decent grafics card this will speed things up a lot.
To be honest pc's are so cheap at the moment mabe you would find it cheaper to simply to buyt a new pc, and use this for your editing purposes only, and use your current one for the net.
Fair point, not a bad idea infact
How much memory does your pc have. I personaly would not use less than 1gb of memory.
I have 1GB of RAM
Can an IDE hard drive be connected to a SATA hard drive ?
That is a great post Jase thanks man!
Is SAS faster than SCSI?
Price isn't a problem, performance is what is important to me (and reliability of coarse)
Easy answer is yes - SAS is faster than SCSI. Also if you are looking at reliability then avoid IDE - both SCSI and SAS will be consistently faster and more reliable than IDE or even SATA (though less so).
The comment about memory etc is kinda relevant but it depends on what you are doing - if disk IO is the bottleneck then no matter how much memory you put in it will still not perform.
If I was building a good system for video editing where budget was a concern but not an absolute priority I would look at something with dual processors (or a dual core processor - the actual processor speed is not so important), 4GB RAM, 4 x 73GB 15k rpm SAS drives in a HARDWARE RAID 10 array for the operating system, applications and scratch disk, xTB of SATA disk for mass storage - not a clue about video cards (though the better and more dedicated the card the less processing the actual system has to do which is always best) and so wont even go there but a system like that using QUALITY components etc would be more than up to the job.
If you are serious about it then there are companies that specialise in systems for video editing etc who are well worth looking at if money is no object.
Jase
Can an IDE hard drive be connected to a SATA hard drive ?
No - one of the benefits of SATA (and indeed SAS) over technologies such as IDE and SCSI is as they are serial rather than parallel based technologies so they can use much smaller and thinner cables but that means there is no backward compatability.
RAID 0 doesn't just offer no protection against failures, you're twice as likely to loose everything as you now have two drives to fail, loose either one and you're in trouble. :(
About a year ago the guy who builds our machines was good enough to let us test head to head SCSI vs SATA. Operating system went on a single drive, then we added a pair of SCSI's - the test was to batch a bunch of images on Photoshop, reading from one drive, writing to the other. Then we did the test again, this time with SATAs. Conclusion, not much in it, SCSI only just faster in real world. We went with SATA, + RAID 0 and just have to back up the whole time, in case a drive fails.
What does help is lots of drives. Seek time from read to writes can really slow a system down hugely. All our machines have OS on one drive, then read images/video from a second, and write out to a third. Speeds up the batches massively and still leaves the PC responsive enough to actually do other work.
Empty drives are faster than full ones. The outer edge of the disk reads and writes faster than the inner edge, so a big drive only a third full will read/write a lot faster than the same data on a disk half the size.
Spindle speeds can speed up seek times but don't transfer data any quicker - on the fast drives the data density is just lower.
I'm looking for a bit of advice on what new hard drive to buy.
I'm looking for a very fast hard drive, I want to use it for windows XP and my programs. Speed is the main factor I'm looking for, I want something that is very fast that will open applications like adobe photoshop & premiere fast and load windows faster.
My current hard drives are IDE (MAXTOR 7200 RPM, Cache 2 MB, MTR: 133 Mbps) They're old and far too slow
I'm just going to use them as storage for my files
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated
Biggest speed difference you will see with those programs is with more ram. We use 2 gig minimum here and have a couple running 3 gig.
Richard
09-01-06, 10:38 AM
I'm looking for a bit of advice on what new hard drive to buy.
I'm looking for a very fast hard drive, I want to use it for windows XP and my programs. Speed is the main factor I'm looking for, I want something that is very fast that will open applications like adobe photoshop & premiere fast and load windows faster.
My current hard drives are IDE (MAXTOR 7200 RPM, Cache 2 MB, MTR: 133 Mbps) They're old and far too slow
I'm just going to use them as storage for my files
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated
If it's performance you are after, Coatsy, and better "multi-tasking" then try 2 PCs :)
Get a bog-standard HP PC for £439 with a 80gb SATA drive:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06b/35123-968421-968421-968421-12113840-12113888-64597667.html
Buy some extra RAM from Offtek @ £62 per GB:
http://www.offtek.co.uk/product.php?manuname=Hewlett%20Packard&maincat=1&subcat=2&model=Business+Desktop+DC5100+SFF+%28DDR2+PC4200%2 9
Get a Belkin KVM switch (allows you to use one monitor, keyboard and mouse with 2 PCs and switch between) for £50:
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/31536
You can end up with a pretty good PC with 2.5GB RAM for about £600 + VAT. You can have one running your Photoshop actions while working on the other one in Premiere :)
Biggest speed difference you will see with those programs is with more ram. We use 2 gig minimum here and have a couple running 3 gig.
What kind of speed increase have you noticed with more ram?
I have 1GB of ram at the moment, would an increase to 2 or 3 GB result in a sizeable difference in speed?
No - one of the benefits of SATA (and indeed SAS) over technologies such as IDE and SCSI is as they are serial rather than parallel based technologies so they can use much smaller and thinner cables but that means there is no backward compatability.
If I decide on SATA then I'll have to dump the IDEs and buy SATA drives for my backup. I suppose it's better to upgrade all of em
Thanks for all the info guys, I might consider your suggestion Richard. Sounds like a decent idea
What kind of speed increase have you noticed with more ram?
I have 1GB of ram at the moment, would an increase to 2 or 3 GB result in a sizeable difference in speed?
The Adobe programs will be a loat faster and latest Premier Pro 2 actually needs 2 gigs to run.
Our new Siren Maxtor video editor runs with 2 x dual processors and 4 gigs of ram and makes working with HDV a breeze.
A Priest
09-01-06, 07:57 PM
if scsi is out of your budget, consider a SATA hardware raid. You can get motherboards (ASUS A8N for example) that have SATA raid on board, or buy an external raid card.
SCSI is fine but as mentioned its both expensive AND noisy (as it revs faster).
Your really looking at small differences though for a lot more money. Also lower CAS memory and a faster / dual core cpu will help, providing (in the case of the cpu) that the program is written to handle them.
The Adobe programs will be a loat faster and latest Premier Pro 2 actually needs 2 gigs to run.
Our new Siren Maxtor video editor runs with 2 x dual processors and 4 gigs of ram and makes working with HDV a breeze.
Awesome! More RAM as well as new HDs
Oohh one thing that just hit me - lots of drives (especially if they are SAS or SCSI) equals lots of heat so proper cooling is VITAL!!! Make sure your case has lots of fans and room even to add more if needs be which means buy a good case - also the downside is lots of drives = lots of heat = lots of fans = lots of noise so it just might drive you nuts if its in a small space!!!
Jase
Oohh one thing that just hit me - lots of drives (especially if they are SAS or SCSI) equals lots of heat so proper cooling is VITAL!!! Make sure your case has lots of fans and room even to add more if needs be which means buy a good case - also the downside is lots of drives = lots of heat = lots of fans = lots of noise so it just might drive you nuts if its in a small space!!
Cheers man, looks like SCSI & SAS are out, I do have a pretty small place
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