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SCSII vs SATA Drives

Started by marcbryant, 2011.06.18, 02:15:10

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marcbryant

I have a scsii system and the drives are about 10 years old.  Have priced new ones and they are kind of expensive to say the least. Are the new SATA drives as fast or will I notice a severe slowdown?  Looking for opinions.

IBManners

Hi,

On the assumption you are using them for a personal computer and your not doing intensive
parallel operation disk I/O.

Current generation SATA drives will be a lot faster than your older SCSI drives, quieter as well.
Even if you are using 10,000rpm SCSI's.

Cheers
Ian
I am the computer, it is me.

Ben

#2

I agree with all of that however, I'll add that when I used a 100% SCSI setup my multitasking was much faster and much smoother.

OS/2 really shines with SCSI, it's like a match made in heaven.

If I could afford to go completely SCSI today with entirely new and current hardware, I would not hesitate.

And I'm not even going to go into how easy it becomes to move information around from drive to drive, even doing three or four move tasks simultaneously I noticed only insignificant performance degradation, (the WPS remaining quite snappy during the move... hardly noticeable from normal), as the SCSI card handled most of the overhead leaving the CPU for the user and other functions.

In fact, it was one of the biggest selling points of my system ten years ago, observers would marvel and how easy it was all handled, thinking I had some form of supercomputing hardware, when it was merely good.

When I switched to SATA single disk access performance jumped up, but disk-to-disk transfers plummeted. In essence, when I'm doing hard drive transfers now, it is better if I simply wait until the task is complete before using the machine again. You can still do it, but it's hardly the same thing and it might cause problems.

Obviously the monetary expenditure was the deciding factor for me... but it might not be for you...


marcbryant

Thanks for the input.  My whole system is scsci. I do a lot of disk activity.  Have 2 drives. One for OS/2 and one for backups and VPC.  So I am always backing up between the two. The two drives are Fujitsu and have a lot of hours on them and I've been real happy with them.  Am looking at $249USD each for 2 new ones that are 15,000 rpm and have more room. (146 mb) Same brand.

IBManners

There we go, the answer was simple :)

I still have one all SCSI system which I keep for photo manipulation, makes a big difference with converting/resizing etc, which I probably do one a year for a major update. Other than that SATA
is all I really need these days. I normally get my backups going when I go to watch TV, and using
DSync or RSync is quick.

I can still remember noticing the difference when I switched from SCSI to SATA speed wise but
its always a pros and con thing, in the end I settled on SATA as my needs had changed, and then
there was the noise factor, even with baffles and rubber mounts.

Cheers
Ian
I am the computer, it is me.

ivan

If you're concerned about backups might I recommend getting a NAS with a couple of 1Tb drives for less than one SCSI drive.

You can do as Ian says and use RSync for backup.  In fact I have two NAS here - one backs up the computers the other backs up the first.

Pete

Quote from: ivan on 2011.06.18, 21:45:08
If you're concerned about backups might I recommend getting a NAS with a couple of 1Tb drives for less than one SCSI drive.

You can do as Ian says and use RSync for backup.  In fact I have two NAS here - one backs up the computers the other backs up the first.


Or even 1Tb USB drives; and luckybackup - see http://svn.netlabs.org/qtapps/wiki/QT4%20Application and http://svn.netlabs.org/qt4 - makes a reasonable frontend for rsynch.

Regards

Pete