SCSI or IDE?

[Sweetie Pie]

Stuff will load quicker http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/smile.gif - get to the fragging those extra tenths of a second sooner http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/teeth.gif

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www.snewell.freeserve.co.uk (http://www.snewell.freeserve.co.uk)

[Sweetie Pie]

Stuff will load quicker http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/smile.gif - get to the fragging those extra tenths of a second sooner http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/teeth.gif

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www.snewell.freeserve.co.uk (http://www.snewell.freeserve.co.uk)

[SchizoidMan]

There's actually very little in it nowadays in real world benchmarks, if you're comparing with a modern, fast IDE drive.

SCSI drives can keep a good transfer rate going, whereas standard IDE drives burst well, but can't keep up a good head of steam.

The new ATA-66 IDE drives (As long as you've got an add-in controller to drive it, as motherboard support is only just coming in) are getting quite good even for long sequencial reads & writes such as in Video encoding, which is where you always used to need SCSI.

It'll be good m8, but don't expect miracles. It's the overall system that counts. Just adding Scsi to a lame system won't give it much of a boost.

[Splinter]

New sys ordered with SCSI 9.1gb hdd.
Is scsi any good for gaming?
Hope so!

[Splinter]

The system on order is:
P3 550 256mb ram 9.1 gb scsi
Rage Fury 128 32mb(G400 delayed)
40x cdrom Yamah 4x4x16 cd/r/rw
Latest m/b with 6pci 1agp 1 isa.
Isdn ta
That should do the trick!

[SchizoidMan]

Sweet core system m8.

[Sweetie Pie]

The major advanatage (now anyway) is not its speed as ATA 66 is pretty damned quick http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/smile.gif Anyway, what SCSI can do is transfer files and stuff on its own. The SCSI card controls the hard disks where as the processor controls the hard disks so you cant do anything while copying a large file.

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www.snewell.freeserve.co.uk (http://www.snewell.freeserve.co.uk)

[SchizoidMan]

This is true: As long as you have a bus-mastering Scsi card, which most are nowadays.

[Hades]

A good system, but get something better than that ATI - it really is a weak point.

For games I don't think SCSI will give any noticable benefit. But for other stuff such as writing CD's etc, it will.

Hades.

[CLARKO]

ATI is not weak it just wasnt made for games only and if he plans on doing something a little more with his time then games and with a system like that i imagine so then he has a good choice, ATI came top for other stuff eg, grafix useee and stuff like that which is why theyre bundled with the apple MAC, so bad choice? depends

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ÇL容KØ
Thei-de Ki'cti-pa

[SchizoidMan]

That's why I said "core system" The rage128 is yesterday's news.

[Aeglos]

Most points seem already to be covered. ATA 66 is pretty damn fast IF you have a M-board which supports it. An LVD (SCSI Ultra 2) is noticeably quicker when moving large Chunks of data, however, when performing such tasks the read head still needs to thermally re-calibrate. So unless you buy an AV Drive (Mega-Bucks!) then all you are doing , going SCSI, is wasting money.

SCSI really comes into it's own for 2 reasons.
1. Think of numbers of drives/devices. I for Example have a fast CD-rom, CD-writer, DVD-rom, 2 4.3Gb UW HDD's and internal zip & jaz. Not Possible without SCSI.
2. As mentioned before, with the Host Adapter handling data transfer it is possible to have two fairly data intensive tasks running simultaniously. Example, last night i was burning a CD while messing around with 50-60Mb WAV files.
Ther are many other advantages of SCSI, like turning of both IDE Channels free up 2 IRQ's and replacing with 1 for the Host Adapter; all little things, but do help.

If Money's no object buy SCSI, in anycase I hope this has helped.

[Splinter]

Well, I got the sys today.
All great... but as u chaps said the Ati
card just will not handle Q2/HL/Unreal etc.
Popped my trusty V2 12mb Sli cards back in and no probs.
No wonder 3dfx have got it taped!They work!