15,000rpm SCSI Hard Drives

[dcw@pr]

I do a lot of work which involves opening large quantities of smallish JPEGs, which is a slow process on my computer, and costs me a lot of time. The computer is a Dual 2GHz G5, with 1Gb RAM - it is the hard drives which are the bottlelneck. I would like to get a 15,000rpm SCSI drive to run my photos off, but all the ones I can find are only internal, and there is no provision for this in the G5. Does anyone know if it is possible to buy an external version of this type of disk? I haven't had any luck on Google yet.

[BrianTheYank]

try this

www.epinions.com/Hard_Drives-External-SCSI_Ultra160_16_bit

[dcw@pr]

Thanks for that. Onlt thing is that they are Ultra160 SCSI, not Ultra320. I dont want to spend a lot of money on a new drive and have it slowed by the interface with the motherboard. Any idea if this will be the case?

[BrianTheYank]

No idea, but a 320 shouldnt be too hard to find. ill look one up in a jiffy.

here we go

www.computeralliance.com.au/parts.aspx?qrySubCat=SCS


and also, how can you not find it on google? I just searched for 15,000rpm SCSI drive ultra320 and came up with plenty of links. Some people gotta learn to use google better.

>> Edited by BrianTheYank on Thursday 1st April 02:28

[dcw@pr]

BrianTheYank said:

I just searched for 15,000rpm SCSI drive ultra320 and came up with plenty of links. Some people gotta learn to use google better.

None of these are external unfortunately. Very easy to find internal ones. The Fantom was the only one I could see, and that is 160.

[BrianTheYank]

I would just go for the 160 then. Better to have that than none at all.

[dcw@pr]

I'll try to find an expert tomorrow who can direct me. Cheers for the help.

[arcturus]

Don't get too hung up on the interface speed. A modern Ultra 320 15000rpm drive will have a maximum burst rate of around 120Mbytes/sec and a sustained rate of around 80Mbytes/sec.

This is well within the capability of the Ultra160 interface let alone the U320 interface.

Of more importance is the spindle speed, access and latancy times, especially if you are reading lots of small files.

So if you can find a 15000 rpm external drive with an U160 interface, a latency of 2ms, an access time of around 4ms and a burst rate of 120Mbytes/sec, then I would settle for that

[stuh]

dcw@pr said:

I'll try to find an expert tomorrow who can direct me. Cheers for the help.

This is a good site - www.storagereview.com

Tries to give real world performance as opposed to synthetic benchmarks.

I also do as lot of photoshop work and my new SATA WD 10k Raptor drives are superb. Incredibly low latency, which as another poster pointed out is of more use in this kind of work than simple platter speed. A pair of these in a RAIS 0 stripe will give a 15K U320 drive a run for it's money at a fraction of the cost.

[dcw@pr]

stuh said:

dcw@pr said: I'll try to find an expert tomorrow who can direct me. Cheers for the help. This is a good site - www.storagereview.com Tries to give real world performance as opposed to synthetic benchmarks. I also do as lot of photoshop work and my new SATA WD 10k Raptor drives are superb. Incredibly low latency, which as another poster pointed out is of more use in this kind of work than simple platter speed. A pair of these in a RAIS 0 stripe will give a 15K U320 drive a run for it's money at a fraction of the cost.

Really? that is interesting. From What I have found, it will cost about £300 for the external 15,000 disk (36Gb), and £200 for the SCSI card, so £500 total. Do you think I can get a two disk RAID setup for less than that?

[ehasler]

stuh said:

I also do as lot of photoshop work and my new SATA WD 10k Raptor drives are superb. Incredibly low latency, which as another poster pointed out is of more use in this kind of work than simple platter speed. A pair of these in a RAIS 0 stripe will give a 15K U320 drive a run for it's money at a fraction of the cost.

I've gone for e RAID 0 stripe set with 2 x SATA WD 10k Raptor drives as well, and am very impressed with it.

[squirrelz]

You can get a kit that adds a PCI card to the computer, plus an external box for 2x SATA drives, and can do raid 0/1 across them.

HOWEVER, it only supports PCs (Windoze, Linux etc).

http://iocombo.com/product/showproduct.php?storeid=1&productcategory=675&productid=04CJ

[dcw@pr]

squirrelz said:

You can get a kit that adds a PCI card to the computer, plus an external box for 2x SATA drives, and can do raid 0/1 across them. HOWEVER, it only supports PCs (Windoze, Linux etc). http://iocombo.com/product/showproduct.php?storeid=1&productcategory=675&productid=04CJ

Damn, that is absolutely perfect, apart from the Windows problem. I assume that is the driver for the RAID controller? Do you know if I could buy that kit, and then get another PCI card which would work with it, and also with a Mac?

[ehasler]

Looks like your luck is in!

Check this out!

Looks like there isn't an SATA RAID card with external ports, but this article suggests simply running the cables out of an empty PCI slot, then you could use the external Highpoint case from the previous post.

>> Edited by ehasler on Thursday 1st April 21:19

[dcw@pr]

I'm so confused. Right now, I think that if I got one of these,

http://store.yahoo.com/firmtek/seseatahoadf.html

Two of these,

www.highpoint-tech.com/rm1110.htm

and two of these,

www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=2SLS|www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=2SLS

then I might have a great setup. Or, on the other hand, it might not work. Any input on this?

Also, given the circumstances I said in my first post, do you think that it is my hard drives that are holding me back?

>> Edited by dcw@pr on Friday 2nd April 00:13

[squirrelz]

Ok going back to the beginning, when you say "large quantities" what volume of data are you talking about?

100Mb, 1Gb, 10Gb?

...and how many files is that? what kind of size are the JPEGs?

It may work out cheaper to add more memory and create a RAM drive, copy the files into it and work from there.
Or, use a memory stick of some sort.

[ehasler]

I think what you'll need is:

A Mac compatible SATA RAID interface card

An external SATA interface bracket

and the two drives and enclosures you listed above.

I don't seen any reason why this shouldn't work, and it will certainly speed up file reading and writing, which will in turn speed up your PC as disk access and transfer speeds are many, many times slower than memory.

[dcw@pr]

squirrelz said:

Ok going back to the beginning, when you say "large quantities" what volume of data are you talking about? 100Mb, 1Gb, 10Gb? ...and how many files is that? what kind of size are the JPEGs? It may work out cheaper to add more memory and create a RAM drive, copy the files into it and work from there. Or, use a memory stick of some sort.

I think a RAM disk is out of the question - I would like to have quick access to at least 10GB of data at any given point, and RAM for the G5 is still very expensive.

[dcw@pr]

ehasler said:

I think what you'll need is: A Mac compatible SATA RAID interface card An external SATA interface bracket and the two drives and enclosures you listed above. I don't seen any reason why this shouldn't work, and it will certainly speed up file reading and writing, which will in turn speed up your PC as disk access and transfer speeds are many, many times slower than memory.

The card you point to is a RAID card, whereas the one I saw is just a SATA interface. Do I need hardware RAID - Mac OSX supports software RAID. Is there a big difference?

[ehasler]

Hardware RAID is normally quicker than software.