Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Converting over to SCSI... Tips & Suggestions please....

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-09-2004, 08:10 PM:

I am loosing my 5th IDE hard drive in four years and went out and bought three Seagate ST150176LC SCSI drives, and Adaptec AHA 2940U2 interface and all the cables and BS that I need to install it(all new for just 200.00.. so actually a great deal). I'm hoping that the SCSI drives will adress some of the reliability issues I've had with IDE drives. Several IT dudes I know seem to think it will.

So where do I start with this pile of stuff....? My system is a dual P-3 running XP Pro and dual IDE drives. Will these new SCSI drives simply replace my C and D drives? If not what should they come up as. I am aware of the addressing part and that the last one has to be terminated, etc...... Any tips and suggestions would be appreciated as I step into this uncharted(for me)area of computers.

Mark

Posted by David Buckley (Member # 2600) on 11-09-2004, 10:09 PM:

I think you'll find a SCSI Barracuda disk is the same disk as an IDE Barracuda, with different interface elctronics. Therefore there should be no appreciable difference in reliability.

If you're killing disks at that rate either you're seriously unlucky, or you're mistreating them, probably though overheating. Unless you address why your disks are failing, I wouldn't expect these new ones to be any better.

Its yonks since I've touched a SCSI anything, but the Adaptec cards always used to come with a BIOS which enables the operating system to boot. Which disk it boots off depends on the address, I think it is either the lowest or address 1 that is the boot disk. Whatever, its in the manual. Once (I'm assuming) Windows is booted it has native Adaptec support which will just work.

To install Windows you need a bootable CD drive, stick the XP disk in, boot, and off you go. It will find the SCSI disks. The drivers for popular Adaptec cards are automatically loaded as required during the installation. You may need to configure the boot order in the BIOS to make CD booting happen.

Dont forget to only leave IDE channels that you are actually using enabled in the BIOS.

(afterthought - you did say replace, not augment - to augment, all this is a little different and simpler - just bung the card and disks in, Windows will find them)

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-09-2004, 10:28 PM:

Its definately not an overheating issue, nor an abuse issue. The other thig is that I let it run all the time unless I'm away for more than 2 days straight and there is a UPS as well. Plenty of air going through this server case... 7 fans and this is a pretty well designed case for airflow which is why I bought it!

I was told by two different IT guys that the SCSI drives work drastically different than regular IDE drives do and that they are built quite a bit better. They certainly are alot taller than the equivelent size IDE drives thats for sure... so they are obviously constructed differently... they are three times the height of my IBM 40 gig C drive in there now. Data transfer rates for IDE are getting close to SCSI but still not quite as good but this particuluar card is not going to get me the highest anyway.

Anyway, I did get it all to work just fine, XP recognized the card and I went in and set the card and drive ID's and now I will attempt to load XP to the new drive...

Thanks!
Mark

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 11-10-2004, 05:51 AM:

The 2940 is kind of an old card. They were good when new, though. Some of them are buggy and won't let you boot off a SCSI CD drive.

Otherwise, you shouldn't have any real problems as long as you pay attention to termination and cable length limitations.

I'm a SCSI snob (the only IDE device allowed in my home is a laptop), but I'd tend to agree that the drives (in general) aren't more reliable mechanically, although they usually offer 3-year warranties, compared with most IDE drives which only tend to come with 1-year warranties. I've killed plenty of SCSI drives over the last few years (due to bad luck, I think). The real advantage of SCSI is that performance under load will be better than with IDE and that disk I/O operations will chew up very little CPU time.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 11-10-2004, 08:52 AM:

Also if you have a boot SCSI drive then you can't have IDE drives connected as well with most of the mother boards I have delt with

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 11-10-2004, 11:21 AM:

quote: Scott Norwood
The 2940 is kind of an old card.

Yeah, around seven years old. The first time I saw it was in 1998, at the time I purchased a dual PII 400MHz system with Ultra2 SCSI integrated in the motherboard (Adaptec AIC-7890 chipset). I hated it with a passion. The SCSI Zip Disk never worked reliably. An attempt at installed a SCSI CD-RW drive turned into a total nightmare. The only SCSI device that worked reliably with this system was a $1200 Linotype-Hell Saphir scanner. I'll never buy another computer that runs everything off SCSI ever again.

The only way I would recommend SCSI to anyone is if they were putting together a server or they just needed to add in SCSI for a specialized purpose, such as running an external RAID disc system for audio and video editing. I very much prefer to run the boot hard disc and other internal devices off IDE.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-10-2004, 12:17 PM:

Its all in and done and was very easy to do. The main thing is to turn off all unused atapi devices as mentioned in the above post or that'll throw you for a loop. I will be trading out that controler card in about a month to the later adaptec card that will double my throughput to 80 mb. This card was a freebie so I can't complain too much....

I'll run this thing for a while and report back re what if any improvements I see.

Mark

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-10-2004, 10:28 PM:

So far I haven't noticed any real difference in speed one way or the other running the computer. Everything is as normal... The good thing is that it doesn't lock up on me any more as as it randomly did because the bad drive is gone. Also my old D drive and my CD ROM, both IDE are all working normally. Now to format another drive and reload all of my files and pictures, etc and store them there.

Mark

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 11-12-2004, 05:15 PM:

An interesting thing I just noticed when comparing specs in the manuals for two Seagate Baracuda drives... my SCSI ST150176LC drive with the equielent Baracuda ST3200822A Ultra IDE drive is that the "Mean Time Before Failure" (MTBF) is double for the SCSI drive. 1,000,000 power on hours for the SCSI vs. 600,000 hours for the Ultra IDE drive.... Pretty intersting.....

Mark

Posted by Thomas King (Member # 2745) on 11-13-2004, 10:26 AM:

I'm a big fan of SATA, however you do really need a motherboard with a built in controller, otherwise the data transfer speed will be limited to the PCI bus speed.