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SCSI or Raptor descisions on 680i platform

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  • Hard Drives
  • SCSI
  • Storage
Last response: in Storage
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April 17, 2007 7:26:47 AM

I bit the bullet and bought myself a shiny new 680i (the Asus P5 SLi one), with a Core 2 Dual 6600 which nicely clocks to 3Ghz on stock cooling. Now i'm left with what is essentially an out dated disk subsystem which is letting my system down.

I have a PCI (32bit/64bit) 29160 SCSI card laying around and was considering simply loading myself up with a couple of 146Gb 10,000rpm SCSI's, but then i thought I might get more bang for my buck from striping some raptors on the 680's onboard RAID, my mind was almost made up to buy 2 x 150Gb Raptors then I read something about the 110Mb/s bottleneck being found on 680i based boards, is this still the case?

Also I've considered going SCSI RAID and getting a nice Adaptec PCI-Express SCSI RAID card and striping a couple of 146Gb SCSI's, but for the same price I could get 3 or maybe 4 raptors striped using the onboard controller!!!

I guess if the bottleneck is still there then i cant exceed 110Mb/s so more than 2 raptors is pointless.

Any views or opinions greatly appreciated.

Also in the system I have 2 x 1Gb DDR 6400 C3 Corsairs and a Asus Extreme EN6800 Ultra (which is due to be replaced by a GTX or GTS when money permits). I'm a gamer but also i like to play with virtual server and so on so my disk throughput is quite key. Capacity isnt an issue as i'm quite prepared to stick with my external 300Gb USB2 disk for mass storage and my system footprint is only about 25Gb for OS/Apps and 30Gb for games, everything else can stay slower as its less time critical, so 300Gb of raptors which i'd aim to use only half of would be fine.

More about : scsi raptor descisions 680i platform

April 17, 2007 11:21:37 AM

Hi ferret,
The first thing I would consider is the bottleneck that exists on the PCI bus. Unfortunately, I don't know how high that is, but someone here will know. On the SATA side, you would only suffer from it during cache reads anyway. I think that you're going to have a hard time hitting 110 MB/s sustained and so my choice would be the two raptors. Remember that they do get pretty hot, so I would avoid placing them one on top of the other. Also maybe you chould try to place them in the path of an intake fan.

Hope this helps!
April 17, 2007 11:48:57 PM

Wow, lots of questions here!

First off, if you are considering running SCSI in a desktop environment you should be looking at 15K SCSI as SCSI disks aren't optimised for desktop tasks so 10K SCSIs are much slower than Raptors. More expensive I know, but there are some good bargains to be had on ebay if you're a fisherman ...

32bit PCI has a maximum bandwidth of 133Mb/s, which would be shared by any other PCI cards you may have. Two latest-gen 15k SCSI's in RAID would be bottlenecked by this.

I don't know about the 680 onboard RAID, but if it is limited to 110MB/s then it will slightly bottleneck two Raptors in RAID.

If you've got the money for the SCSIs, then a PCI-Express card is the best route - a single PCI-Express lane has maximum bandwidth of 250MB/s, which could feed 2 or 3 disks at once. You could even get an SAS card, which you can attach SATA AND SAS disks too.

If you haven't, then the 150GB Raptors are very fast for desktop tasks and won't let you down. You can buy PCI-Express SATA RAID cards for not very much.
April 18, 2007 8:59:45 AM

Hi, Thanks, I think you've pretty much confirmed what i was thinking, i might spring for the Raptors and use onboard, if I find any flat lines in my benchmarks I will get myself a sata pci express card, i was looking at the 8 lane pci express cards but as you state, a single lane pci express still provides more than enough bandwidth for a couple of striped disks
!