SCSI drives for gamers

I read a lot of PC magazines. Mostly MaximumPC. I very rarely see them mentioning SCSI drives. All of there Dream Machines have ATA hard drives in them.... these computers are supposed to be the best reguardless of cost so I don't understand why they don't run U320 SCSI RAID on 15K Hard Drives?

How many of you have been led to believe that the raptors are the fastest drives in the world?

I'm sorry folks a sATA RAID has nothing on an Ultra 320 RAID 0 running on a few 15K drives.

So with that.... what do you run?

I read a lot of PC magazines. Mostly MaximumPC. I very rarely see them mentioning SCSI drives. All of there Dream Machines have ATA hard drives in them.... these computers are supposed to be the best reguardless of cost so I don't understand why they don't run U320 SCSI RAID on 15K Hard Drives?

How many of you have been led to believe that the raptors are the fastest drives in the world?

I'm sorry folks a sATA RAID has nothing on an Ultra 320 RAID 0 running on a few 15K drives.

So with that.... what do you run?


Well I'm sure most of us would love to run SCSI drives especially in raid arrays but their cost makes them very prohibitive.

Maybe after I'm done with my university I might be able to get some 15K Cheetah's. As Homer would say....mmmmm sweet mouth watering cheetahs....;)

I also see that you aimed this question at gamers. Well according to the tests Maximum PC did a month or so ago modern games are so cpu/gpu intesive that the HD is not the bottle neck (at least during game loading). The test showed no differences in loading times between the same rig with or witout striped raid.

Also I know WD is always in the spotlight with new perfomance HD (in the ATA and SATA market). But personally the only HDs that i trust are Seagates. They might be expensive and not offer all the bells and whistles of the other guys, but they are the most reliable(and now with 5year warranties). And reliability is the most important factor IMO for a HD. All the speed in the world won't help if you lose all the data.


Oh and to answer your question I'm running a 80GB Baracuda IV for my operating system and programs and a 200GB Baracuda for most of my data and as a scratch drive for Photoshop.

i've got 5 WD2500BB's (250GB parallel ATA) drives in my server (SaMBa/Apache/DNS).

In my desktop i've got two 36GB 15K Cheetahs on an adaptec I2O RAID card (abeit only 160MB/s) :-(

Yeah, I hear you about the load times in games and such but for me the biggest difference between my MC at home (SCSI) and my PC at work (ATA) is the overall snapiness of the system. It's just damn quick. menus pop up faster. it may seem strange, but when I'm at home that's what I notice the most. My home PC seems faster than my work PC. except when installing programs or using the CPU a lot :-)

Home XP2500
Work 3.0Ghz P4

One thing we should all be able to agree on is that maxtors suck, or at least they did the last time I bought one 2 years ago. :-)

Oh I bet your sytem reacts faster with those Cheetahs, most of the time the HD is the big bottle neck.

BTW i presume you're running the 2 cheetahs stripped and not mirrored, in that case you have probably maxed out the PCI bus the adaptec is running on. It seems that 3 late model ATA drives in Raid 0 are enough to reach ~133MB transfer speeds which is close to the PCI bus max. I can only presume that 2 15K cheetahs would be up there too with transfer speeds.


Oh and you mentioned that Maximum PC dream machine. I was disapointed too. They spent over half their budget on peripherals. They should've spend the entine 10K on exotic computer components. With that money you can get a tyan mobo with quad opterons, 3 cheetahs to run a raid 5 or 4 cheetahs to run raid 10 or 0+1 (anyway some config for speed and redundancy), tons of low latency memory ETC....

yeah, i've got that poor 64 bit card plugged into a 32 bit slot. the biggest thing for my speed is the random access time. and yes it's a RAID 0.


about the dream machine. i mailed them and bitched. they gave me some bullshit about SCSI hard drives not being relistic for average consumers and this and that.... i responsed and asked about 5000 dollars worth of display but i got no response back.

about the dream machine. i mailed them and bitched. they gave me some bullshit about SCSI hard drives not being relistic for average consumers and this and that.... i responsed and asked about 5000 dollars worth of display but i got no response back.


Could they be more obtuse. The whole point of a dream machine is to use exotic expensive and super fast components. Otherwise they should just call it the Realistical Machine.

You should've asked them if the Honda Civic is their dream car sice Ferraris don't aply by not being realistic.

And among the peripherals the monitor bugged me the most too. To spend half the budget on it was stupid. The name of the magazine is Maximum PC not Maximum Home Theater.

For speed, I'd probably swing SCSI RAID 0. For average consumer cost, SATA RAID 0.

I run standard IDE because SATA wasn't around when I built the PC (or was too new to be cost effective for me) and SCSI was out of my budget.

I'm happy though - it runs everything I've thrown at it so far, but I'm not a hardcore gamer or video author. Running a Pentium III 1.2ghz with regular IDE. Server is dual Pentium III 1.0ghz with standard IDE via controller card (440BX chipset only supports ATA 66 - controller bumps it to bus speed of ATA 100).