Any point in SCSI HD using PCI card?

[sprstock]

For some time now I have been considering installing a SCSI hard drive with the only programs loaded being Windows 2000 and Flight Simulator, solely for speed considerations. However, with the advent of SATA drives more information has come to my attention concerning the real gains made when using a SATA drive connected through a PCI controller card. The information I've been able to find indicates the motherboard itself turns out to be a bottleneck due to the buss speed of the motherboard (in my case) being 133MHz far less than than the capacity of the drive.

It would appear the same bottleneck would exist if I added a SCSI drive connected through a PCI controller card. Is this assumption correct?

Thanks.

S McNary

 

[Crashman]

Not exactly. There are no drives that can output in excess of 133MB/s continuously. You should be able to run a RAID 0 or 5 cluster for performance using the minimum number of drives (2 for RAID 0, 3 for RADI 5) without noticeable performance loss.

For larger clusters you would need a faster PCI slot, such as those found in servers, to maintain optimum transfers.

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[shadow_of_colors]

yes, the mobo will still be a bottleneck, but as Crashman said, there are few drives that can pump out that high a data transfer rate continuosly, although SCSI drives can come closer than anything else right now. remember the main purpose for SCSI drives are server/workstation applications. in an average PC you won't notice a whole lot of difference until you start running lots of applications. SCSI offers simultaneous read/write capabilites, command queing, and some other advantages i can't think of right off the top of my head. the main advantage you would see would be when you try and run a program off the SCSI drive and another one off an IDE drive on your mobo. since the SCSI drive is on a totally separate bus it won't be affected as much by what's going on on the normal IDE buses.
anyway, just my two cents
Cheers

 

[ytoledano]

HDs usualy aren't the bottleneck in a computer, faster memory, or even a complete upgrade of the mainboard, CPU and memory can prove more effective. I can't recommend on an upgrade since you hadn't stated what system you are currently using.

I had a much better usertitle but was caught trying to hack me a better one so I got my current title as a punishment

 

[attitude]

Your woundering if the PCI bus could be a blotle neck. sure it could. the pci bus is 33MHz and 32 bits wide that gives a maximum performance of 132Mbyte/s when reading from the hdd cache you could max this. Also consider if you are sharing the PCI bus with a Gbit lan adapter etc bandwidth must be shared so 132Mb/s is an absolute maximum for your SCSI contoller.