I can certainly sympathise with the sentiments about SCSI drives expressed in this thread.
>From my personal experience, I have been supporting a professional broadcast playout system used at a number of sites around the world, for more than a decade now. The oldest of these systems were installed with 5.25" Seagate 1 GB Wren drives, which have been running 24/7 for over a decade, and 95% of them are either still running, or were retired after 7-8 years of flawless operation. We started switching to a third party RAID solution, where the array had a SCSI interface but used IDE drives, about 3 years ago, on the assumption that while the drive failure rate would be higher, the lower cost and ease of replacement would more than compensate. It didn't. We had our first failure withing 4 weeks of install, and whilst most are handled by the RAID unit, about 1 or 2 per year fail in a way that fools the RAID logic and causes a system crash. This is a much higher failure rate than we had with simple mirrored SCSI drives. On another, unrelated system, a PC based RAID card resulted in 100% data loss when one drive in a mirrored pair failed, and after installing a replacement, card decided to re-mirror using the new drive as the master, destroying the content of the surviving drive from the original pair. So yes, SCSI is usuall more reliable and higher performance, but more expensive and noisier. Regards, DigbyT On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 07:27:49AM -0500, Bill Roberts wrote: > On 17:34 Tue 29 Mar , daniel wrote: > > I buy a new computer every 5 years or so. My current machine is an > > Athlon800 > > and it continues to perform well because I was careful about my purchasing > > back in 2000 and I'd like to repeat that this time around. > > > > To that end, I'm looking for suggestions from the lot of you with regard to > > what kind of hardware I can/should get for my new shiny desktop machine. > > Some good suggestions in this thread. You'll find a nicely organized > set of suggestions for systems of various price levels at: > > http://hardwareguys.com/picks/picks.html > > I've built based on their suggestions, with no prior experience at it, > and had great success. > > The only thing they have missed, IMHO, are Western Digital's SATA > drives. I have two of their 10,000 rpm Raptors running on a RAID0, my > machine screams. These are Western Digital's effort to break into the > commercial, i.e., scsi, market, and are, by all reports, rugged and > reliable. > > The only real problems with scsi are that they tend to be LOUD, and > they are priced for the commercial market, i.e., expensive. > > Bill Roberts -- Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digbyt.com -- [email protected] mailing list
