Question on SATA and SCSI

[hons]

Hi,

I'm planning to build a new machine w/ Q6600 and 4GB of RAM.

The question is : I have 2 x SCSI 320 73GB (10Krpm) and 2 x 320GB (7200rpm) SATA HDD, I'm thinging should I buy a ASUS P5E WS w/ PCI-X to use the 2 SCSI HDD or I should just buy a P5E to use the SATA HDD.

DO anyone know which solution will be faster???

Thanks.

[cluberti]

Depends on what you're doing with it - the SCSI controller and drives support things like NCQ and out-of-order execution, whereas (most) SATA controllers nor disk drives do not. If you're just talking about day-to-day workloads, SATA is cheaper and will give similar performance. If you're talking about disk-intensive work, SCSI will be faster.

[hons]

So, If I use the 2 x SCSI run on the PCI-X as RAID 0 to be the system drive and 2 x SATA RAID 0 as data that should be good enough???

[nmX.Memnoch]

Yeah, that'll work although I'd recommend RAID1 for the data unless you have a good backup strategy.

Also, that's a lot of money to spend for SCSI especially when the difference probably won't be as much as you might think since you're using it in a single user environment. SCSI is a parallel technology and is quickly being replaced by SAS, even on the low end.

[hons]

Also, that's a lot of money to spend for SCSI especially when the difference probably won't be as much as you might think since you're using it in a single user environment. SCSI is a parallel technology and is quickly being replaced by SAS, even on the low end.

Thanks for your information. The reason I want to use SCSI is because I have 2 HDD and a PCI-X133 controller and I don't want to waste them. Also, I heard that if PCI-X133 w/ 10K SCSI HDD can provide very good performance (better than SATA). Is that true???

[nmX.Memnoch]

Yes, that will definitely provide better performance. I was just recommending against it if you didn't already have the hardware.