SCSI - whats all that then?

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Discussion

thepeoplespal

Original Poster:

1,674 posts

284 months

Wednesday 21st May 2003
quotequote all
Managed to acquire a few hard drives recently including a new (still sealed in anti-static bag) IBM SCSI HDD in the box.

Model: DDYS-T36950,
Capacity 36.7Gb,
Manufactured Dec 2000.

Thats what it says on the IBM sticker and serial numbers and according to google should also have:

68pin connection
10,000rpm with a 4Mb buffer

So do I junk it and stick with the two 40Gig IDE drives and try to sell the SCSI drive (not sure how much it is worth) or do I spend some money I don't have on a SCSI card, had a hoke (look) round PCWorld (I know, I know) and they only seemed to have 50pin SCSI cards.

MickC

1,041 posts

265 months

Wednesday 21st May 2003
quotequote all
Flog it on ebay to someone who needs it.

It will be faster compared to your IDE but will make one hell of a racket and you'd need to fork out for an utra3 scsi card. If your system is decent to start with and and you are running NT/2000/XP then you would see a small performance increase in disk related taks using it but it's probably not worth the bother.

thepeoplespal

Original Poster:

1,674 posts

284 months

Wednesday 21st May 2003
quotequote all

MickC said: Flog it on ebay to someone who needs it.

It will be faster compared to your IDE but will make one hell of a racket and you'd need to fork out for an utra3 scsi card. If your system is decent to start with and and you are running NT/2000/XP then you would see a small performance increase in disk related taks using it but it's probably not worth the bother.


Any idea what it is worth? or if an Ultra3 scsi card could cope with my old SCSI CD-writer?

I read plenty of PC mags, but they don't really cover SCSI a great deal.

joust

14,622 posts

266 months

Wednesday 21st May 2003
quotequote all

MickC said:It will be faster compared to your IDE but will make one hell of a racket and you'd need to fork out for an utra3 scsi card. If your system is decent to start with and and you are running NT/2000/XP then you would see a small performance increase in disk related taks using it but it's probably not worth the bother.
Err - not sure why you would say it's more noisy???

The mechanics are almost identical - just that SCSI has a much better transfer rate (it's a structured bus rather than a self clocking bus).

SCSI cards are in the range of £25-80 nowdays - re-sold it's worth about £10....

J

ErnestM

11,621 posts

274 months

Thursday 22nd May 2003
quotequote all
I only find SCSI disks "noisier" during initial spin up. As I use them almost exclusively on servers, that is rarely a problem.

The only non server that I run SCSI disks on is my system that I use for movie editing. The superior disk read/cache capability is great for multimedia.

The cool thing about SCSI is that you are not limited to just 2 per chain.

ErnestM

scruffy

3,757 posts

268 months

Thursday 22nd May 2003
quotequote all
what kind of drugs are you on???


please?

ErnestM

11,621 posts

274 months

Thursday 22nd May 2003
quotequote all

scruffy said: what kind of drugs are you on???


please?


?
ErnestM

joust

14,622 posts

266 months

Thursday 22nd May 2003
quotequote all

scruffy said: what kind of drugs are you on???
please?
????

5ltr-chim

635 posts

264 months

Monday 26th May 2003
quotequote all
SCSI - wonderful interface - Currently got 5 scsi, disks - 5 scsi cd's, 2 ide's disks ide cdrw and ide dvd on this m/c - that lot coupled with the 7 fans is a tad noisy...

FYI you can convert 68pin wide to 50pin narrow and the busd will slow to MAX 10Mb/sec transfer instead of 20Mb/sec. - still faster than most ide's.

I'll give you a tenner for it anyday!!

agent006

12,058 posts

271 months

Tuesday 27th May 2003
quotequote all
SCSI's reputation for being noisy is almost always based on peoples experiance of the Seagate Barracuda 18gig. Quite possibly the loudest anything in the history of everything.

joust

14,622 posts

266 months

Tuesday 27th May 2003
quotequote all
Apart from the odd TVR