A little hardware help...

[onlinebacon]

Hey,

I need a little help. I am building a new PC, and I have the option of my dad giving me a 80gb Maxtor ATA133 hard drive, or 2 scsi 18gb hard drives.

The problem is, I am not sure which one to have. The SCSI can transfer at 40mb/s because of the card, and the Maxtor, about 133 i think, because of the ATA-133 name.

Which one should I get, as in, which would be faster?

Thanks,

onlinebacon.

Ps. PC specs are amd64 3000+, 1gb RAM, ATI Radeon 9700, Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard, so erm, hope that helps

[smp-freak]

Setting up SCSI I know is not my forte', However to get up and running the 80GB IDE Drive will give you ample speed, and no real configuration is needed. Plus there is a higher risk for data corruption if you try and configure a software raid, however depending on the SCSI Card that you have as well the Hardware RAID may need to be configured. If this is just a Destop, or a "I want to try a Linux PC" then go with the IDE and save yourself some headaches. However if you get the Operating system installed, and want some extra storage, By all means hook up the SCSI and see what happens as extra storage.

Hope this helps

[drl]

Hi, onlinebacon.

I benchmarked the usual three kinds of devices on a single machine. Of course, benchmarks are subject to a host of variables, but since these were all on the same machine, some of variables were eliminated. These timing were from SpinRite ... cheers, drl

Date: Tue May 16, 2006

Computer: IBM Intellistation Z Pro, 2 X 550 MHz Xeon, 512 MB

ATA (PATA)
IBM DTLA-307030, ATA
30.0GB, 10ms, 100/7200RPM

SCSI
Seagate Cheetah 9LP ST39102LW, 9.1 GB Ultra2 SCSI
Estimated (original) Price: $1199

SATA
DiamondMax Plus9 120GB Hard Drive (Maxtor-6Y120M0) -
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 120GB Hard Drive
Serial ATA-150, 7200 RPM, 8MB

I am not sure of the units, but I'm guessing Mbits / second.
So, sustained speed for ATA / SCSI / SATA: 5.8 / 19.7 / 67.5.

I have been running a software RAID-1 on an older IBM Netfinity with SuSE 9 for about 3 years -- 1 9 GB SCSI, 2 4 GB SCSI (the RAID-1). I am quite happy with both the performance and the reliability.

Outside of setting up software RAID, I don't recall anything special that I did in any distribution for the SCSI drives.

I agree with smp-freak that, all things considered, the ATA is probably easier with which deal, at least initially. Don't throw away the SCSIs, however ... cheers, drl

[fingal]

A tough choice! It's a few years since I built this old machine (/me stops to pat Bessie his faithful old PC) and I installed a 60 GB hdd which I'm never going to fill. I would keep things simple and go with the IDE hdd.

Actually, I think that many people use hdds which are way too big for them (like me) and it's better to invest in more RAM as a general rule.

[onlinebacon]

ooh ok, thanks for those benchmarks and other comments people, they helped a lot, guess i shall have to shell out and buy myself a SATA hard drive, seems the way forward