scsi or ide drive?

[diveram]

What does everyone think about scsi hard drives vs. ide hard drives? My system only has one drive in it for now. (spent to much on the build) I am running a web server and a mail server on the same machine. I would like to (I think) seperate the two on different drives. Plus all of my back-up folders are on the same drive (not to smart, I know) I would like a little input and ideas on what to do. I am thinking of one ide for the OS. One ide for the mail server. What about the web, my board has 2 ultra 320 scsi connectors built in. What are the pros and cons of scsi?

Brian

[Mntsnow]

I personally prefer scsi in my hard core servers for and due to the fact they were truly designed for 24x7 operation.

Pros
As above
faster seek times, faster interfaces (comparing todays scsi vs todays ide duh ;) )

Cons
Cost
Additional heatload

[NDC]

It all depends what you do with your system in my opinion. To really take advantage of SCSI is when you do tasks that require heavy I/O. One good example of this could be running graphic applications and working with graphic files 100~150MB and up or perhaps running audio / visual editing applications or require heavy multi-tasking.

Many people think that they're going to see a significant difference with general tasks such as gaming, office apps, internet browsing, etc. However, you will not. SCSI shines on high I/O and multi-tasking environments. SCSI doesn't purely rely on the CPU like IDE devices do. SCSI has its SCSI controller chip which is dedicated to SCSI devices therefore freeing the CPU resources for other tasks. I have a dual MP2000+ with IDE UDMA133 7,200rpm hard disk and a dual MP1800+ with SCSI U160 10K which are basically the same systems other than the hard disk interface. The MP1800+ blows the socks of the MP2000+ when it comes to graphic applications.

The downside to SCSI is that you must buy a U160 or U320 controller cards which aren't cheap not to mention the price of SCSI drives. And another downside is the boot process where it takes like 10 extra seconds to load the SCSI BIOS and detect all the SCSI devices.


Click (http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29&highlight=SCSI)

[Xaotic]

I strongly prefer SCSI drives, under one primary condition, you can afford it. Personally, I use it for any machine that I have hardware available. The SCSI interface spec is much more controlled than ATA and I use the error checking functions that it offers.

In your situation, assuming that you're running the services under XP Pro, 2K Pro or any version of server and the need for major amounts of space is not critical, you could go with two SCSI 10K RPM drives in software RAID-1 on both channels of the SCSI 320. The positive sides are very good read performance, inherent data redundancy(both OS and web/mail files), adapter would not need to be purchased, exceptional interface speed and lack of contention for channels. The downsides are very high costs, slower writes than a single drive and if the board dies, the need to replace the board with one with a compatible SCSI HBA to recover the data. This would provide for backups and give almost RAID-0 performance for reads, for web and mail serving, with limited downsides. That being said, for the about the same cost, you could get a good PCI(at least 66Mhz/64bit) IDE RAID adapter and a couple of larger IDEs for RAID-1 and accomplish the largely same result.

Personally, SCSI is much better, but you have to be able to afford it.

[diveram]

Thanks for the info, I have a dual processor so I don't think processor loading is much a factor, however a few more questions remain. Are scsi hard drives as easy to use as ide drives (like plug and play) Would you keep your OS on ide or switch? Can you run both? I am not doing any thing yet, just trying to learn about it. I have to do a bit of reasearch on my board, I think it has a controller built in (MSI E7505) Any brands to avoid?

I like the replys, very educational! Thank you all!

[NDC]

Yes, you can run IDE and SCSI devices at teh same time. SCSI and IDE are two totally different controllers, so...

Yes, they're quite simple to set up since they're usually configured to be used right out of the box. Under Windows 2000 and XP, you won't need to install drivers for the SCSI card as you would with the older OS's such as 9x, NT, etc. 2k/Xp will detect the SCSI card and detect the SCSI hard disk without any problems with most SCSI cards.

I use SCSI and IDE on this system:

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/gallery//showphoto.php?photo=360&papass=&sort=1&thecat=500


I runs the OS on the SCSI drive and use IDE for saved files... I want my OS and apps to take advantage so.... :)

[Mntsnow]

Diveram,

Yes your board has On-board Scsi (E7505 Master-LS2) so it's pretty simple to add on a scsi harddrive(s) to your system. btw it is a Ultra320 scsi dual controller so you can run U320, u160's and even u2w drives (80 & 40's) although I would personally stick with U160's or faster since your board supports them and you have a rockin setup and you wouldnt want the u2w type drives being the bottle neck.

[a Bill]

Nobody ever seems to mention pathing which determines bandwidth available per controller. If you use two devices on the same bus you halved the available bandwidth for the devices. Three devices on the same bus deteriorates bandwidth availability farther.

Pretty much what this boils down to is that the IDE and SCSI controllers need to be on seperate bus' or bandwidth is reduced to the point where no device can operate at its rated capacity. Your bandwidth is limited on the motherboard too you know. The North and South Bridges can only carry so much.

Oh well, in this instance IO will probably be low enough that nobody will ever notice.

[Xaotic]

That's true, but the e7505 chipset board's bus structure is very well segregated and there should be very little contention in this situation. There are slots up to PCI-X 64bit 100Mhz on this MSI-9121 board and chipset spec details 3 separate PCI busses. If this were a conventional PCI bus, I'd be very worried about contention and bandwidth saturation.

[diveram]

Thank you everyone! I will do more reading and learning. I don't have the cash yet, but I really want to make my server more stable and better. Plus for some reason I am bent on seperating the mail server disk from the web server disk.

Ill let you all know someday when I make a decision.

[a Bill]

Xaotic, I didn't know that. Thank you for the info.

diveram, seperate servers are always better (IMO) but not everyones budget allows that. The budget determines the hardware for most folks. In a corporate atmosphere usage would determine hardware.