Building with SCSI?

[Aguy]

My boss wants me to build him a PC for video editing. The trick is he wants 4 SCDI drives totaling 400 or 500 gigs, and I don't even know where to start with that. Here's what I got:

Motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131180
CPU: http://www.newegg.com/product/Produc...82E16819115017
Ram: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231136
VC: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814195024
Onboard audio
I don't know what I would need power supply wise yet.

[Cricket]

Where are the SCSI components?

Cricket

[Aguy]

Originally Posted by Cricket Where are the SCSI components? Cricket

Can you recommend one?

[Alaron]

Is there a specific need for SCSI?

Using SATA drives on that P5K would be much easier. He'll need an SCSI adapter card otherwise, along with the drives. It could easily break $1000 just for those.

[Aguy]

Originally Posted by Alaron Is there a specific need for SCSI? Using SATA drives on that P5K would be much easier. He'll need an SCSI adapter card otherwise, along with the drives. It could easily break $1000 just for those.

Well the thing is, he's convinced that they are the fastest things for video editing. That's the actual benefit of these damned things?

[Lespaul20]

SATA performance is catching, or may have caught up, with SCSI. SATA are a lot cheaper than any SCSI setup, like Alaron said.

[Aguy]

Originally Posted by Lespaul20 SATA performance is catching, or may have caught up, with SCSI. SATA are a lot cheaper than any SCSI setup, like Alaron said.

Can you recommend a SATA drive that would match SCSI speed?

[Cricket]

Although SATA is based on SCSI technology I think SCSI may still have an edge in some cases. For one, only SCSI has 15,000 RPM hard drives available. Fastest SATA hard drives are 10,000 RPM.

And I'm not sure about SATA but you can move data to and from a SCSI hard drive at the same time. You can't do that with IDE hard drives.

And although it's getting fairly aged, SCSI is still the data storage protocol of choice for server duty. They've proven themselves over the years to be very robust and reliable.

You very rarely ever see SCSI in home computers anymore.

If your boss expects this to be a workstation then SCSI may be the better choice...but the cost will be fairly high.

Cricket

[Lespaul20]

This is a dated article but show that SATA is becoming comparable to SCSI.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=19

From what I understand, SCSI Disk usually have a lot better MTBF hence why they are used in Server situations.

I noticed Dell and HP both have SATA drives as their default option for their workstations. I don't know if just a marketing thing so you don't run aways when you see the price for the SAS drives, which is very pricey upgrade.

Here's what I think for SATA. Look at drives with at least 16MB of Cache. The 10K Rapters will also add a little performance but will cost a little more.