320SCSI Adapter and 320HD in Desktop

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GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#61139 10-May-2010 15:08

Giday to all here at Geekzone

Could some one with some knowledge of SCSI host raid adaptors and SCSI hard drives could help me? please

I was given two SCSI 320Hard drives and a Host Adapter Adaptec 3940uw however my harddrive benchmark software shows that my IDE and Sata hard drives have faster data transfer speed than my 10,000rps 320SCSI

Im about to buy a SCSI host adapter and is confusing
I think i should get a Adaptec 320mbytes/per second
or a Adaptec 160mbytes/per second

only two questions:

firstly which one of these are better for my harddrives 320scsi adapter or 160scsi adapter?

secondly will these adaptors work on my AM2 Motherboard in PCI socket or will this only work on servers motherboards,? I have been using the Adaptec 3940UW in my mobo with PCI socket and works fine.

Thank you all knowledgable people of Geekzone,

I appretiate you help,

Andy

PenultimateHop

637 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#328583 10-May-2010 16:27

GamerOC: firstly which one of these are better for my harddrives 320scsi adapter or 160scsi adapter?

secondly will these adaptors work on my AM2 Motherboard in PCI socket or will this only work on servers motherboards,? I have been using the Adaptec 3940UW in my mobo with PCI socket and works fine.

If you have U320 drives, then get a U320 adapter - SCSI is relatively backwards compatible anyway. The 3940UW you have is only UltraWide which means 40MB/s transfer rates.

As long as the adapter you choose is PCI/PCI-X (assuming your mobo supports PCI-X) and supported by your OS, it will be fine. I'd recommend Adaptec or LSI because of their fairly wide OS support.

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#328709 10-May-2010 21:27

Hi PenultimateHop thanks for the info,

so I have Ultra 320 SCSI HD so I should buy 320 SCSI adapter card right, i think i got that
would it work if I use the Ultra 320 HD with 160 SCSI adapter card? would i just get half of the data transfer speed?
the reason i ask is because my mobo has socket PCI but not the long PCI socket required for 320 SCSI cards
You reckon that would it work?

thanks again,

cheers

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#328726 10-May-2010 23:06

Now i'm going to buy Adaptec 320host adapter for my two Ultra320Hard drives but due to my mobo only has pci socket and not a pci-x socket someone told me it will run with low bandwith????
so wont run 320mbs data transfer... i'm still confused,

Thanks

Andy

PenultimateHop

637 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#328741 11-May-2010 03:39

GamerOC: so I have Ultra 320 SCSI HD so I should buy 320 SCSI adapter card right, i think i got thatwould it work if I use the Ultra 320 HD with 160 SCSI adapter card? would i just get half of the data transfer speed?

Yes - if you connect it to a U160 controller you will only get 160MB/s on the bus (note that bus speed != disk read/write speed!).

GamerOC: the reason i ask is because my mobo has socket PCI but not the long PCI socket required for 320 SCSI cards

That's OK. If you buy a U160 card it will work fine.

GamerOC: Now i'm going to buy Adaptec 320host adapter for my two Ultra320Hard drives but due to my mobo only has pci socket and not a pci-x socket someone told me it will run with low bandwith????
so wont run 320mbs data transfer... i'm still confused,

You'll run at 320MB/s on the SCSI bus, but you'll be limited to the bandwidth of the PCI bus from the controller to the rest of the PC. Assuming this is 32-bit/33MHz your peak I/O bandwidth will be about 125MB/s - probably far more than the sustained read speed of the disk(s).

In short: don't worry about it - unless you have multiple disks on the bus and you have an extremely I/O heavy requirement, you probably won't even notice it.

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#328864 11-May-2010 12:10

Thanks to you PenultimateHop i think i'm confident now to go ahead with my setup,
I highly appretiate you sharing you knowledge with me,

thank you,

Andy

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#329551 12-May-2010 22:13

Hey there, could you please help me out again,

I just have two questions:

1- are ide sata or scsi the fastest hard drives for desktop and gaming?

2- I just faced compatibility support for win7 64bit ans SCSI cards.. so would i be better going for a 320SCSI card that has no win7 support and hope will run... or should i go for a 160SCSI that is win7 64/32 supported for my 320harddrives and if harddrives running 160mbytes instead of 320mbytes will this still be faster than 7200rps sata harddrives?

thanks,

Andy

PenultimateHop

637 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#329592 12-May-2010 23:55

GamerOC: 1- are ide sata or scsi the fastest hard drives for desktop and gaming?

2- I just faced compatibility support for win7 64bit ans SCSI cards.. so would i be better going for a 320SCSI card that has no win7 support and hope will run... or should i go for a 160SCSI that is win7 64/32 supported for my 320harddrives and if harddrives running 160mbytes instead of 320mbytes will this still be faster than 7200rps sata harddrives?

1. There is no one way to answer this question. It will depend on the type of the drive, the speed of the drive, the speed and type of bus (SCSI, SATA, PATA), and the interface from the bus to the southbridge (PCI-X, PCI, whatever).

Generally speaking SCSI or SAS will outperform SATA and PATA if using modern and comparable equipment; but comparing an old FastWide SCSI 5400rpm drive to a 10K SATA drive would not be fair.

SCSI isn't typically used in desktop PCs due to cost (and the higher RPM drives tend to be irritatingly loud); but it does perform quite well and has a number of benefits (such as queuing; multiple devices; hot swapping, etc) that have meant it happily lives on the high-end server world.

2. If the SCSI drives are 10KRPM I expect they will be faster than the 7200RPM SATA drives. I can't help with the Win7 support - it is not my area.

The difference between U160 and U320 isn't really noticable under typical I/O load unless you have lots of devices on the bus (e.g. a busy RAID).

nb: It's been quite some time since I've had to deal with servers. My knowledge is probably a bit out-of-date now.

GamerOC

439 posts

Ultimate Geek

#329596 13-May-2010 00:07

Thank you so much for sharing with me you actually very knowledgable about this things.

I got a 2 10rpm Ultra320 drive and is not too loud but fast installed win7 nearly half of time it took my normal hd to install it.

I found server 2008 drivers that work for win7 64bit

thank you,

Andy